


Through the looking glass

by The_Watchers_Crown



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Coffee Shops & Cafés, Hang tight guys, Keep Watching, M/M, Slow Burn, The slowest burn the Eye ever did see
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-03
Updated: 2019-05-12
Packaged: 2019-07-24 10:59:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 15
Words: 63,839
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16173707
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Watchers_Crown/pseuds/The_Watchers_Crown
Summary: In another life, Martin Blackwood and Jonathan Sims are happy. (Featuring—but not, strictly speaking—a coffee shop AU.)It’s not until he’s tucked under the covers at ten in the evening that Martin pulls at the twine holding the mirror’s wrapping.“It’s just a mirror, Martin,” he chides himself. “Don’t be daft. Imagine what Jon would say if you went to him with this.” That’s if he said anything, and didn’t just look at Martin with the sort of expression usually reserved for subpar tea.





	1. the other Martin

The mirror is a curious little object.

Martin runs across it while perusing a charity shop in the hopes of finding a poetry book he hasn’t already read, after finding himself up to his elbows in Keats and Wordsworth and Blake that he’s got on the shelf at home. It seems rude to search the shelves for so long and then leave without actually  _buying_  something, so he keeps looking until he finds himself scanning an aisle of trinkets and decor, and he thinks a little hopelessly,  _Maybe I can find something for Mum._ It’s not a surprise when the majority of it is kitschy, generic stuff that might make most mothers happy, but his would mock him for it, if she agreed to see him at all.

He passes over a collection of wall art, several nondescript mugs, and a birdfeeder before his eyes land on the hand mirror. There’s nothing noticeably special about it, except that it’s obviously old, and well-made, and the flicker of motion—his own reflection—takes him aback. It’s silver, and heavier than it looks. The front looks just how Martin expects a hand mirror to look, but the back is molded into a design of two people, their palms pressed flat against each other’s. Or maybe it’s one person, reflected. There’s something written around the edges in what looks to be Old Norse.

Martin turns the mirror over again and takes a look at himself, like there might be something new he somehow missed while brushing his teeth this morning. It’s only going to remind him he ought to go for a trim. He starts.

The reflection is different.

It’s not  _massively_  different. That’s his own face in the mirror. Well. Mostly, it’s his own face in the mirror. The Martin looking back at him appears to have spent more time smiling, and his hair might actually have been combed today, and there’s a little nick of a scar beside his left eye. Martin unconsciously touches that spot beside his own eye, because he’s sure there’s never been anything there and if he’s suddenly developing new scars without actually having been wounded…well, he’d rather not have another statement to make.

He squeezes his eyes shut in the hopes that this reflection, just different enough to be uncanny, will shift itself back to normal.

To his surprise, it does. It was probably never different. He’s spent too much time in the Archive, is all, surrounded by the unusual, and it’s got his mind playing tricks on him.

The mirror costs fifteen pounds. Martin leaves with it wrapped up safely in brown paper.

* * *

 

It’s not until he’s tucked under the covers at ten in the evening that Martin pulls at the twine holding the mirror’s wrapping. He’s not sure why he brought it to bed with him. (He’s not sure why he _bought_ it.) There’s a collection of modern poetry with him too, something he gave in and picked up later in the day, but it’s the mirror he reaches for.

He holds it up in front of his face and releases a breath he hadn’t noticed himself holding when it looks exactly the way it should.

“It’s just a mirror, Martin,” he chides himself. “Don’t be daft. Imagine what Jon would say if you went to him with this.” That’s if he said anything, and didn’t just look at Martin with the sort of expression usually reserved for subpar tea.

He begins to set the mirror aside. Then there’s a flicker of movement in the glass that certainly  _isn’t_  in his bedroom and Martin yelps. There’s somebody behind his reflection, waving their arms wildly, a red-faced woman with greying hair and enormous spectacles. Martin glances over his shoulder.

The only thing there is the headboard, because nothing else would  _make the remotest bit of sense._

He looks back to the mirror. The Martin in the glass has a scar again. The Martin in his bed swallows. “Nothing,” he says, his voice soft and unconvincing, “this is nothing to worry about.” The reflected mouth doesn’t move to match his, just twitches into a tired smile. “It’s not flesh worms trapping you inside your flat.”

 _Sure,_  a traitorous little voice exactly his own agrees.  _Plenty of other things that might kill you._

Martin forces himself to breathe, and to tilt the mirror in every possible direction, until he’s seen more of the other Martin’s surroundings than the little oval surface should show him. Of course, it should be showing him  _himself_ , his actual self, so “should” obviously doesn’t have much bearing on the situation at hand.

The other Martin is in a café, behind the counter, behind a case of pastries and sandwiches. There’s another man with him, with long blond hair tied back, wearing an apron and a dusting of flour. The place is brightly lit, sunlight streaming through windows. Martin, the other Martin, the impossible Martin, turns, and the Martin whose fingers tremble horribly around the mirror can see the rest of the premises: it’s a little café, populated by university students and the occasional obvious professor, and the visibility, the angles, they’re not really what they should be, and Martin, the logical Martin, shuts his eyes because it worked earlier and this  _really_  can’t be happening.

But when he looks again, there’s the Martin in the café, and the Martin in his bed drops the mirror onto his legs with a glum, “I only wanted some new poetry.”

It’s a stretch of seconds before he realizes there’s something else amiss. That is, the mirror is pointed straight at his ceiling,  _not_  in his hands, and he’s staring across the room at a spider on his wall…but he can still see the other Martin, calmly addressing the shouting woman while a few students look on, unimpressed. He can see the entire café.

Worse, he can hear it.

* * *

The day sure is off to some kind of start.

Martin Blackwood, owner of Cosy and the epitome of calm, wears his most patient smile. Quite the opposite of him are Michael Shelley—currently covered in flour and looking bewildered—and the woman from several shops down, who shows no sign of running out of steam for her tirade about—

“I’m sorry,” Martin interrupts, soft enough to throw her off her rhythm, “what is it you feel Michael’s done wrong?”

The woman draws herself up to her full height, almost a foot shorter than Martin, and says a crisp, “He refused to serve me.”

Martin knows how untrue that is, but he’s not going to call a business neighbor a liar directly to her face. Instead he looks at one of the university students, a regular of theirs called Melanie, who’s been watching the whole thing with her arms folded over her chest. “Did you see that happen?”

“No,” Melanie says, flat and not-yet caffeinated. “Michael told her he’d be just a moment, as he had to make my coffee. Which I don’t have yet, by the way, because waiting her turn was too much to ask, and here we are.”

It’s only the smell of cinnamon and apples that stops Martin from wincing at the not-ideally-diplomatic testimony. His café does live up to its name, welcoming and homey and calming. Melanie does not. He nods to Michael. “Take care of Melanie’s coffee, will you?” Then it’s back to the woman, who looks ready to boil over. “There, then. Michael would never refuse to serve you…”  _For fear of retribution if nothing else,_  he thinks. “But we do ask that you respect our other patrons. That said, I’ll be happy to serve you now?”

The woman’s eyes don’t actually glow red, he’s nearly sure. Martin is relieved when she turns on her heel and stalks from the café with a snapped, “Terrible way to run a business,” as his chest has been getting tighter, and he can’t stay calm forever.

“Terrible way to run a life,” says the next customer, another familiar face. Sasha, Melanie’s best friend and classmate, scans the case of sweets. “Can I have one of those apple strudels? I don’t think I’ve tried one yet.”

“They’re new,” Michael tells her, handing Melanie her coffee. “I hadn’t made them before. Hopefully they turned out all right.”

Sasha, who’s tried just about every variety of pastry Michael’s whipped up since Cosy opened, laughs. “You haven’t let me down before.” She asks Martin for her usual lemon tea and pays, before shuffling aside.

“If you’re ever thinking about a career change,” says Tim, already cheerful enough that Martin expects Melanie to start threatening him about enjoying the morning too much—again. “You might want to consider joining up with bomb disposal.”

Martin’s reaching for the blueberry muffin he knows Tim’ll be wanting with one hand, and ringing up his coffee with the other, while Michael scurries around behind him, already taking care of both drinks at once. “Why’s that?”

“Because,” Tim says, “you’re so good at defusing the situation.”

Martin snorts. The next customer in line—this one not a familiar face—laughs, and then looks ashamed of themselves when Melanie gags.

“Was that supposed to be a  _joke_?” she asks.

“His face almost makes up for how bad his sense of humor is.” Michael hands Sasha her tea and strudel. Then he turns to retrieve Tim’s from the countertop, and whitens, evidently realizing he’s said this out loud. “Ah. I mean.”

He practically shoves Tim’s drink into his waiting hands before rushing past Martin to offer help to several groggy-eyed students.

“You know you don’t have to flirt with the customers to get paid, right?” Sasha says.

Tim grins. “Don’t discourage him.”

Martin listens to this while taking care of additional customers, switching from taking orders to retrieving food to putting together drinks as though on autopilot, but fully conscious of every move he makes. Intensely aware of every individual second spent in his shop. Cosy has been his dream for years, something he’s saved for while working endless hours at other cafés, something he’s bled for in the metaphorical sense if not physically (several pre-opening scrapes notwithstanding), and it thrills him constantly how perfect the reality of it is. Their location near the King’s College Strand Campus is ideal, and Michael is a model employee (not to mention one of the best pastry chefs in London), and though they’ve only been open for a month, they’ve built up a base of regulars on top of a steady stream of occasional-droppers-by and newcomers. There’s little more he could ask for.

As it has been every Monday morning, the café is full of a variety of customers. Sasha, Tim, and Melanie have all snagged a table together, which is a typical sight that never fails to warm Martin up; Sasha and Melanie, both grad students, have been friends for years, but Tim is a publishing professional, and hadn’t met either of them until a similarly crowded morning in the café. That friendship is the result of his busy little place. He needs to find time to interview additional help, most mornings looking like this one, but he and Michael are managing on their own so far.

During a brief lull, Martin asks Michael to restock the case, as the pastries do tend to go quickly, and he does a circuit to wipe down tables. He’s chatting with a few customers, making sure they’re enjoying their breakfasts, when the door next opens, and he glances up to see a dead-eyed, dark-circled, disheveled blond man, accompanied by a scrawny, smirking, shaggy-haired man with a dab of paint beneath one eye.

Martin excuses himself to slip behind the counter and begin readying a coffee and a mint green tea. The disheveled blond casts a suspicious look at the case; Martin calls, “Michael, have you got the strawberry-graham scones?” and Michael comes rushing out with a new tray of pastries.

“He didn’t sleep,” the man spotted with paint says helpfully, patting his companion on the shoulder.

"I thought as much," Martin says.

The other man swats at him. “Neither did you, Gerry.”

“No, but  _I_  don’t have class in twenty minutes, do I?” Gerry pauses. "Also, I'm not a right bastard when sleep-deprived."

Martin leaves Michael to ring up the drinks while he takes over reorganizing the pastries, taking one aside to hand across the counter. “Good morning, Jon.”

* * *

The image fades. But calling it an image—that’s not really  _right_ , because Martin couldn’t just see it, he could hear it and practically feel it, and there are a few thoughts lingering in his head that he’s sure aren’t his own, quite.

(Are they his own, if that was him? But it wasn’t him, also.)

He adjusts the mirror, turns it every which way, but now it only shows his own face, the one without the scar, the one that needs to get more rest; it also shows his headboard and his ceiling, but there’s not a café reflected back at him.

There’s not another world in the glass.

It’s gone now. But Martin Blackwood, Archival Assistant, doesn’t doubt for a second that Martin Blackwood, owner of a London café called Cosy, is just as real as he is.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Evidently I like starting fics in the land known as Between Season 1 & Season 2.


	2. the wrong Jon

Martin peeks into the mirror while getting ready for work.

The other Martin is there against the backdrop of his café, laughing at something Martin cannot see.

He bundles the mirror into a towel and fits it into his satchel.

* * *

It’s much too early for this.

Jon hasn’t yet settled at his desk when Martin barges into his office, a wildness on his face that immediately raises Jon’s hackles. He watches Martin yank his bag open with enough force that Jon expects it to rip; then, in complete contrast, Martin eases some towel-wrapped object free, cradling it as though it’s an infant. “Martin,” he says, the not-inconsiderable amount of trepidation coming out knife-sharp, “what is that?”

“It’s a mirror,” Martin says, a bit feverish. He stuffs the towel back into his bag and glances into the mirror, visibly swallowing. “I bought it yesterday at a charity shop.”

“There are mirrors in the Institute,” Jon says.

“Right, sure, but this one is.” Martin stops, and Jon can tell he’s searching his mental lexicon for a word that isn’t “spooky” or “eerie” or some other such nonsense that will have Jon throwing him out of the office. Jon still might throw him out of the office, if only to make a point. “There’s something  _odd_  about it. The reflections it shows aren’t right. I mean, they’re completely wrong. They’re not even really reflections? It’s like there’s another world in there, with another me, except the Martin in the glass doesn’t work at the Institute, he owns a café—it looked like quite a nice café, actually—and there was another you there too, I think he might have been a professor, and I didn’t know what to do, so I brought it here. It’s got to be paranormal, right? Mirrors don’t just show us other worlds, that’s…that’s not how mirrors work.”

Jon stares at him. There’s certainly enough conviction in Martin’s voice, but he said it himself: that’s not how mirrors work. Mirrors don’t show alternate worlds.

It would be too early for this at three in the afternoon. As it’s eight in the morning and Martin hasn’t brought any tea along, it is  _genuinely_  too early to listen to him babbling about other Martins, other Jons, and cafés. Jon pinches the bridge of his nose, closing his eyes as though the situation will clear itself up if he stops looking at it.

It doesn’t, of course. Martin is still there with a mirror in hand, clearly expecting Jon to do something about it. As though the things he collects in his personal hours are a problem to be taken to his boss. “You had an odd dream, Martin. You work in an odd place, and it gave you an odd dream.”

“I thought it might be my imagination at first too, but it’s not,” Martin says, his voice rising in both volume and pitch. Jon winces. “There’s something  _weird_  about that thing, what it showed me wasn’t, I wasn’t even really looking at it when—just look at it, Jon! You’ll see what I mean.”

“Fine.” Jon tamps down a frisson of irritation. Several frissons. If it’ll get Martin out of his office… “Fine. Give it here.”

Martin pushes the mirror at him with such vigor it nearly falls. Jon half-wishes he’d let it crash to the floor. There would be the glass to sweep up, but it would put an immediate, definitive stop to this nonsense. Now the mirror is in his hand and unobservant as Martin may be, even he would notice Jon just—opening his hand and letting gravity take its course.

So he studies the damn mirror. It’s a beautiful piece of workmanship, and Jon is certain that whatever Martin paid for it, it wasn’t enough. He’s no expert in dating antiques, but guesses it must be at least three hundred years old; there are a few researchers upstairs who would be capable of pinning it down to the decade or closer, if he wanted to waste their time with it, and he really doesn’t. The design is interesting enough, two androgynous figures, possibly the same person, and the words engraved in the edges are indecipherable. There’s a perpetually curious part of his brain that wants to know what the words say, and the significance of the figures, and he might satisfy that curiosity, if not for the fact that he has much more serious concerns these days.

Jon turns the mirror over. He’d best get on with it before Martin starts talking again. The glass shows him what he expects to see: himself. Jon frowns back at his reflection. The dark circles beneath his eyes make it clear how little time he’s spent sleeping over the last few weeks; when he does sleep, it’s fitful, constantly broken by nightmares and cold sweats. His face is drawn, stressed and frustrated. His scars are—

 _That’s not right,_  he thinks.

The scars that have marred his skin since the day Jane Prentiss and her hive and their song came to call are gone. There’s no sign they ever existed on the face looking back at him, which is, ostensibly, his own. The exhaustion is there. The stress and frustration stare out of the glass. But the Jon in the mirror is unblemished, aside from a spot where he must have caught himself with a razor.

Jon’s eyes flick toward Martin, who’s chewing anxiously on his upper lip, and then back to the mirror. To his great relief and dismay, his scars are right where they’re all meant to be. He frowns. “It’s a mirror, Martin. Perhaps it’s some kind of trick mirror, but it’s certainly not anything paranormal.”

“I’m telling you,” Martin says, and Jon truly considers whether shouting at him would be worthwhile, “when I looked at it last night there was a café, and it was run by another me, along with some blond man I’ve never seen before. And you were there, and Sasha and Tim were there, and that woman—Marian? Melanie King, the one who was in here before—”

“Martin.” Jon fixes him with a peevish look. It’s the quieter option. He’s got more important things to be doing than having pointless debates with his most incompetent assistant. “Don’t you think it makes more sense for it to have been a dream?”

Martin has the gall to roll his eyes; Jon is impressed despite himself. “Of course that would make more sense, but it’s not what happened. It would also make more sense for me  _not_  to have been stalked by a demon-worm-woman- _thing_ , but that happened. The first time I looked at the mirror, it was just a little bit  _off_ —this scar I don’t have?—and when I looked again later, it was a lot off. I work at the Magnus Institute, I don’t really care if things make sense, and Jon, you have to listen to me.  _Please_.”

The ‘please’ gives Jon pause. “Then leave it here with me. I’ll check it again in a few hours. Now get to work.” He sets the mirror down. “Please.”

This, finally, seems to set Martin at ease. To some extent. Jon isn’t convinced “at ease” is a state of being Martin has ever fully realized, but neither has he; it’s one thing they do have in common. But Martin’s shoulders visibly loosen, and his mouth twitches into some distant relative of a smile. He says, “Thank you,” and then, “I’ll just go,” and he does.

The silence he leaves behind is a blessed relief.

 _Another Martin? One of him is quite enough,_  Jon thinks uncharitably. He casts the mirror a dark look and hides it inside his desk with no intention of looking at it again. He’ll tell Martin he has, and that there’s nothing to worry about, and to do something relaxing with his evenings. Adopt a cat. Put together a jigsaw puzzle.

Work on his bloody poetry.

It’s bad enough that Jon takes the Archive home with him; he hasn’t got the patience for Martin to come running to him with some new ghost or monster or possessed antique every other day. This mirror isn’t magic, or cursed, or otherwise supernatural, and if it were a statement Jon would, in Martin’s words, tear it to pieces before filing it neatly into the Discredited Section. If the mirror had come from Mikaele Salesa,  _then_  it might be cause for concern. As it came from an ordinary charity shop, it’s not worth worrying about.

 _Leitners have appeared in charity shops,_  a mocking little voice reminds him.  _You’re only dismissing this because it’s Martin._  And maybe he is, but ‘because it’s Martin’ strikes him as a perfectly valid cause for skepticism.

But he was right about Prentiss. He was  _attacked_ by Prentiss.

Jon could, he supposes, ask Sasha to look into translating the characters on the back, but it’s almost certainly nothing and he’s not sure of the wisdom of indulging Martin’s little fantasy any further than he already is. He drags a stack of statements toward himself and pushes the mirror from his thoughts.

* * *

The trouble is his curiosity. Much as Jon wants it to mind its own damn business, it gets the better of him in the end. He means to keep his attention on his work, but time and again his thoughts drift to his desk drawer. To the mirror he’s hidden away. It’s just a mirror. But what if it’s not?

Glad to be alone, Jon makes a frustrated sound and wrenches open the drawer. The mirror seems to taunt him, to say, ‘I knew you’d be back.’ He drops the thing onto the desk and makes eye contact with his reflection.

“There’s nothing unusual about you,” he tells it, “and I don’t have time for you.”

It makes a strange sort of sense that his reflection doesn’t speak along with him.  _Ah,_  he thinks, as though some part of him recognized this inevitability long before the rest of him caught up. The Jon in the mirror is wrong again. The scars have gone, and his backdrop is a bookcase of reference materials pertaining to classic literature; Jon recognizes several of the spines as having been on his own shelves at one point or another.

“You’ve got to be joking.” Jon looks away and then back. Jon, the wrong Jon, sits up straighter in his chair and gives something a glare rather like the one Jon, sat in the Archive Jon, is giving the mirror. Jon says an accusatory, “You were supposed to be  _normal_. I was only humoring Martin.”

Except, of course, that’s turned out not to be the case. Jon makes an angry sound and continues to observe—Jon, the wrong Jon, the one who doesn’t have trauma written on his face. He adjusts the angle of the mirror until, impossibly, he can see what the reflected Jon is glowering at; it appears to be some sort of essay, but Jon cannot make out the text. If he were to guess, the Jon who’s gone and ruined his day is also in an office, one that’s dimly lit by a desk lamp, and cramped not because it’s packed with years upon years of mess, but because it would be cramped even with nothing inside.

_Damn._

Jon turns the mirror over to study the back more closely. Several of the characters are familiar to him, possibly Old Norse. Maybe he should find a reference text and translate it on his own. There are also minute differences between the reflected figures, though he has to squint to notice them: an odd scuff mark here, an extra glint of silver filigree there. And then he realizes, stranger than the characters or the figures, he can still see the reflection, if it can really be considered a reflection; he sees the wrong Jon, scratching red ink across the essay he’s reading, and though his own office is silent, he hears his own voice— _his_ voice—hears the other Jon muttering to himself.

* * *

The Shakespeare papers are abysmal.

If Jonathan Sims, doctoral student-slash-teaching servant at King’s College, were at all interested in another stern lecture from Dr. Bouchard, he’d burn rather than grade them, and present the students with the ashes. As it stands, the university would frown on that behavior, so he keeps his arson-esque urges in check. He’d allowed them to choose their own plays, in hopes that this would result in higher caliber papers; he’s succeeded only in subjecting himself to a much greater array of foolishness. Why limit them to poor essays on  _The Merchant of Venice_  (five papers), when  _The Merry Wives of Windsor_  (three, whose authors probably believed themselves to be making wholly unique choices) and  _Titus Andronicus_  (one, handed in by a sallow boy who hasn’t said a word since introducing himself on the first day of class) can also contribute to his suffering?

He’s also got plenty of  _Hamlet_  and  _Macbeth_  essays in front of him; of course he has.

“I am picturing you as cinders,” he says to one paper, before dropping his pen and leaning back so far in his chair that it threatens to fall over, which would about sum up the day he’s had. Mondays are complete rubbish, full of foundational students who fancy themselves above his lessons, with no time whatsoever for work on his own thesis unless he forgoes sleep; he often does. There are too many papers left to grade, and if he does them now he won’t have to think about them again, but enough is enough.

Jon turns the lamp off and leaves his sorry excuse for an office.

It’s nearly eight, and sick as he is of reading assignments, he’s not in the mood to go home. Gerry’ll be there, making a colorful mess of their front room and playing music much too loud; Jon wants, craves, needs quiet. Needs to empty his head.

His wandering of the streets borders on aimless, though he makes a point of keeping to streets he knows, streets that still have people on them. His thoughts do their own share of wandering: from his paper to his grandmother, from the students he really does  _try_  to teach to the only positive facet of his Monday, which is that little café Gerry first dragged him into a month ago, that still has a veneer of ‘new’ over it. Evidently his thoughts and his feet are of a mind; Jon finds himself in front of the café window.

There’s still light inside, and Jon sees Michael sweeping the floor. It closes in two minutes, and only bastards go into places two minutes from closing. Jon still hasn’t slept, and as Gerry pointed out, he’s a bastard when he hasn’t slept.

He goes inside.

Michael looks up from his sweeping and starts to say, “Hi, we’ve already cleaned the…” and then stops when he sees Jon. “We’re out of your scones.” This, he says apologetically.

“It’s the end of the day,” Jon says, by which he means,  _They’re delicious, so of course you are._

“Right. Um.” Michael seems unsure where to go from here. Jon hasn’t a clue either. He doesn’t know why he came inside, except that Cosy is a comfort to him in the mornings.

They might stand there forever, except their standstill is broken by Martin, the place’s owner, walking out of the café’s back, wiping his hands on his apron and saying, “Michael, did you lock u—oh, Jon. I didn’t realize anyone had come in.” He gazes at Jon for what feels like a long time. “You can go on home, Michael. I’ll take care of locking up.”

“Sure,” Michael says, his eyes darting to Jon and then back to Martin, “but…”

“It’s fine.” Martin smiles; Jon can’t recall having seen him do anything else. He thinks, distantly, that he should offer to turn around and leave, but there’s a wave of exhaustion towing him under, and the thought is too far away, and so he keeps on standing there. Michael leaves, and Jon is somewhat aware of exchanging polite farewells, Michael looking suitably concerned about the situation all the while.

Then it’s just Jon and Martin, standing across from each other in an otherwise empty café.

Jon says, “Does Michael think I’m going to murder you?”

Martin’s laugh is the best thing Jon has heard all day, strong and warm. “No, probably not. Michael just worries, in a general sort of way.” He leans on the counter. “What are you doing here?”

“I don’t know,” Jon confesses. “I just found myself—I can go. I _should_ go.”

“You can stay if you want.” Martin nods toward the empty tables that have clearly been wiped down already. “I don’t mind. I’ll fix you something to drink.”

“You don’t have to do that.” Jon stays beside the door. Because he should go. Really.

“Sit down, Jon,” Martin says, and disappears into the back room before Jon can protest.

It’s sit or continue hovering awkwardly. Jon gives the door an uncertain look, but he doesn’t have the means to lock it, and he doesn’t _want_ to leave, so he crosses the floor and takes a seat. His phone vibrates in his pocket; he ignores it, looking around the café. It’s always overfull in the mornings, which Jon knows is excellent for Martin, but also means he and Gerry have to hurry on their way, to make room for the next in line. There are a dozen tables, a shelf full of poetry books, a chalkboard proclaiming the day’s specials, and—Martin, returning with a cup of tea, which he sets in front of Jon.

“I just have a few things to finish, if you don’t mind giving me a minute.”

“What do I owe you?” Jon reaches for his wallet. Though the café isn’t the cheapest of the nearby coffee options, not nearly, he never minds the expense. His phone vibrates a second time.

“You don’t.” Martin whisks away again, this time heading for the door and locking it. That done, he collects the broom Michael left leaning on the wall and takes it into the back. Then he’s at the till, counting under his breath.

Jon doesn’t watch him, just hears him moving about, taking care of whatever tasks closing up shop entails. The tea is hot and sweet, and some of the tension leaves him with the first sip. It’s not something he would ordinarily order, but it is delicious, and somehow it’s exactly what he needs. He takes a second sip and closes his eyes. When he opens them again, Martin is across from him with a second cup of tea, and a sandwich. “I’m going to guess you haven’t eaten dinner.”

“I haven’t,” Jon says. Martin takes a drink of his tea and Jon’s eyes are drawn to the working of his throat. The sandwich is as good as the tea.  _He’s too kind._  “You’ve a knack for establishing customer loyalty.”

“You’re a customer I like.” Martin runs a hand through his hair, which is dark and neat and wavy. Probably soft, too. “And you look like you’ve had a long day.”

Poorly written essays swim behind Jon’s eyes. “I’ve taught five classes and read too many of their papers, and they’re all awful. I don’t believe they even tried.” He sighs and has a bite of his sandwich. “Most of them want to be in my course about as much as I want to be teaching it, but they might put in as much effort as I do.” He winces. “One of them wrote that Romeo can’t be held accountable for Ophelia’s death.”

While not technically incorrect, at a certain distance and angle...well.

“Oh, dear.” Martin gives him a sympathetic look. Though Jon and Gerry always move along quickly, Martin has heard plenty of Jon’s grumbling about his teaching obligations. “None of them were any good?”

Jon considers, for a moment. “There was one,” he says slowly. “The student presented an intriguing case for Hamlet and Horatio’s relationship being more intimate than Shakespeare was able to present in the text.”

“Did they just turn in a copy of the play with a few bits highlighted?” Martin leans forward.

“That would have been clever.” Jon finishes his sandwich, and Martin watches him, and Jon feels more at ease than he has in days. Martin’s got a real gift. There’s a spurt of vibrations from his phone, but he continues to ignore it. He takes another swallow of his tea, which is no longer scalding fresh, but hasn’t yet gone cold. “You could have told me to leave, Martin.”

“Yes,” Martin agrees, “I could have. We are closed.”

“But you let me stay,” Jon says, uncertain.

“You looked like you could use a friend.”

This comes as a surprise. “Are we friends?”

“Sure,” Martin says, and Jon is notoriously poor at reading people, Georgie all but announced her intentions over a loudspeaker and still had to kiss him before he worked out that she might be interested in him; all that to say, he isn’t quite sure of the expression on Martin’s face. It’s  _probably_  not romantic interest. It’s  _probably_  just that Martin is friendly, perfectly suited to running a business like Cosy. Jon has no reason to be thinking about Martin’s possible romantic interest anyhow, though Martin is certainly attractive, and— “Are you doing okay, Jon?”

“I’m just tired.” Jon forces himself to focus. “I should let you get out of here.”

“I don’t mind,” Martin says. “You can come by anytime you need a friendly face.”

“I do like your face,” Jon says, because evidently his mouth has decided to make its own choices.

Martin laughs; Jon doesn’t feel as though he’s being laughed at. “You’re not so bad yourself.”

Jon really doesn’t know what to say. He stands, too abruptly, but he can hardly  _un_ stand. “I should let you get home.”

“Okay.” Martin stands too, and collects the dishes, and it occurs to Jon he should offer to wash them. But he suddenly feels awkward, and rather alarmed about his mouth’s newfound self-determination. “I’ll see you in the morning?”

“Oh,” Jon says, nearly shocked by the reminder, as though he hasn’t been here _every_ morning for weeks. “Yes, in the morning.”

Martin’s  _still_  smiling at him, and he’s going to do something stupid if he doesn’t leave immediately. Thankfully, Martin sets the dishes on the counter and unlocks the door. The last thing he says is, “Try to get some sleep tonight, Jon.”

“That’s not likely. I’ll let you know tomorrow.”

“I’ll be waiting,” Martin says, and Jon convinces himself to walk away.

There are an absurd number of text messages on his phone, from both Gerry and Georgie. The last reads, ‘Georgie and I have pizza. Get home and eat, you insufferable git.’ Jon rolls his eyes. He looks over his shoulder before leaving Cosy and its owner behind; he’s very nearly smiling.

* * *

 

In the Archive, in his office, Jon blinks away the remains of—of the world he’s just seen and heard and felt. He wants to disregard it as his imagination running away with him. Overreacting to Martin’s overreaction.

He wants to; he can’t do it.

There’s another Jonathan Sims. A Jonathan Sims who is working toward his doctorate at King’s College. A Jonathan Sims who is a regular at a café owned by another Martin Blackwood. A  _wrong_  Jonathan Sims; but it hadn’t felt wrong. It felt almost pleasant. Simpler, if it weren’t adding a new layer of complication to his already excessively complicated life.

“I hate you,” Jon informs the mirror.

By rights, the thing should go to the Institute’s Research team and then on to Artefact Storage.

Jon places it back in his drawer.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Posted way later than intended...but also nearly 2x the intended length. Balance??? 
> 
> Anywho, I do like to work on a schedule, so (now that my life is somewhat organized again) this fic will be updating on Sundays bi-weekly. Every _other_ Sunday I'll be a) updating Statement Incomplete or b) posting something else entirely. 
> 
> (I am accepting requests.)


	3. just a glimpse

As it turns out, it’s more than a bit difficult for Martin to keep his attention on his work, knowing that Jon is just in the other room with the mirror. He’s written himself a list of things that need doing, everything from digging through police reports to making phone calls, but actually  _doing_ them—he hasn’t, exactly.

He wonders if Jon has given the mirror a second go, when he’s meant to be comparing addresses.

He imagines the other Martin, busy and smiling in his café, when he should be digging through newspaper articles.

He doodles Cosy’s storefront into the margins of his notebook, when he ought to be scrutinizing dates that aren’t matching up.

He thinks he’d like to look at the mirror again.

It was nice, sort of, to see himself looking so happy. It would be nicer to have that himself, his actual self, but that’s rather out of reach.

* * *

 

Not thinking about the mirror is impossible.

Jon does, for a time, set himself to other tasks: he records several perfectly mundane statements, the sort that the laptop is more than happy to accept; he compiles a task list for his assistants based on a statement the laptop mangles, or a statement that mangles the laptop; and he contemplates Gertrude’s murder and whether or not his own—admittedly lackluster—investigative skills will be enough to solve it before he meets the same fate. All the while, the mirror sits in his mental periphery, that mocking little voice from before crooning that he should just…keep watching.

 _Just a glimpse,_  the voice says.

 _Piss off,_  Jon replies.

It’s his own voice; it’s more irritating than Martin’s.

The trouble arises when he realizes that the file he needs—a reference of known Leitners, when and where and with whom they’ve appeared—is in the same drawer as the mirror. He considers, as he skims a statement featuring  _Ex Altiora_ , just how badly he needs the file. “Don’t be an idiot,” he says to himself, his hand hovering beside the drawer.

It’s only natural that the back of his hand brushes the silver frame.

* * *

The living room is every bit as noisy and in disarray as Jon expected it would be. Gerry is playing something fast-paced and German, and has covered their walls and floor in canvas, and proceeded to splatter paint everywhere in a fashion that likely makes sense in his head; Jon, sat on the sofa, can’t make heads nor tails of what his friend is trying to achieve, but then, he rarely can. Art, visual art, doesn’t speak to him the way books can.

“You’re not eating,” Georgie says from the opposite end of the sofa. She’s got a slice of pizza in one hand and a pen in the other, a notebook open on her lap.

“I already told you,” Jon says, watching Gerry trace the outline of a woman’s face on top of a mess of blues and greens, “I ate.”

“You did say that, yes.” Georgie takes a bite of her pizza. “But you’re rubbish at feeding yourself, and neither of us was with you to do it, so I’m not completely convinced.”

“I’m not a child.” There’s not much use in saying it. They’ve had this conversation, the three of them, enough times that it would be comical, if it weren’t so—frustrating isn’t quite the word he’s looking for. It’s nice that they worry for him, he thinks. Most of the time. It’s good of them, and they  _care_  for him, and so on. But he’s perfectly capable of taking care of himself, no matter how much his friends think otherwise. He doesn’t need them to be overbearing. “I have more interesting things to lie to you about than whether or not I’ve  _eaten dinner_ , Georgie.”

“Really? Because  _that_  was the most interesting lie you’ve ever told me,” Gerry says without turning around.

“It wasn’t.” They’ve been friends too long, and he’s not _that_ dull.

“You can tell us if you were out ritual sacrificing one of your students.” Georgie says this far too cheerfully, and then looks as though she’s had a brilliant thought; she drops her pizza to scribble something into her notebook. “We’ll be your alibi.”

“You’ve caught me,” Jon deadpans. “I couldn’t take them anymore.”

“Go on then,” Georgie says, still writing avidly, “give us the details.”

“I dread to think what you’d do with them.” Gerry turns, paint dripping onto the canvas below. “Where were you?”

“Georgie said.” Jon waves at her.

Gerry gives Jon the worst sort of look, like he’s seeing him all the way through to his skeleton. Having an artist for a best friend can be alarming that way.

“Oh, all right.” Jon pretends not to notice the way Georgie perks up, or the subtle shift to Gerry’s face. Completely overbearing, the both of them. “I was at Cosy.”

Georgie’s face scrunches up. “That café you two’re obsessed with? Didn’t they close ages ago?”

Jon thinks about Martin Blackwood smiling at him in an otherwise empty café, about the way his laugh transforms his face. Which Jon does like, though he still wishes he hadn’t said it like that. So forthright. So…dim-witted. I do like your face.  _Honestly._  He can’t have been that much a mess with Georgie; he probably was. “We’re not obsessed.”

Gerry jabs the paintbrush toward him. “Speak for yourself. Martin and Michael are culinary geniuses.”

“Fine, Gerry’s obsessed,” Jon says. A splotch of black lands just shy of his foot. “Yes, they were closed, but I was there anyway. Martin is.” He stops. They don’t need to know everything.

“Jon,” Georgie says, delighted, “have you made a new friend?”

Jon focuses on one of Gerry’s paint-spattered tattoos. It’s the first he ever got, while Jon sat beside him and pretended the needles in the room didn’t make him nervous. He doesn’t want to snap at Georgie for taking an interest in his life, and the tattoo, a lithe figure with an awkward number of limbs, has a way of working the knots out of his temper. Fond memories, calming effects. He shakes his head. He’s not annoyed with Georgie, not really, it’s everything else. Not least how dreadfully exhausted he is.

_Try to get some sleep, Jon._

Georgie is clearly waiting on an answer.

“I don’t know,” he says, which isn’t entirely false, and is (at the very least) the most interesting lie he’s told them tonight. He stands. “I’m going to bed.”

* * *

 Jon wrenches his hand back as though he’s been burned.

The other Georgie—he heard the wrong Jon think about her before, and now he’s seen her, and it looks like  _that_  relationship ended a fair bit more amicably than his own. They’re sharing a house. That they’re talking at all is a step ahead.

And then there’s Gerry—Jon hasn’t the faintest who he is. Martin saw more of their familiar faces. Sasha and Tim and Melanie King. But there’s a heavily-tattooed painter living with a him who isn’t him. Something about him rings a bell.

And— _and_ —the wrong Jon’s hair hasn’t got any grey in it.

He fishes a plastic glove from a bucket of cleaning supplies left behind by whomever cleared his office of worm corpses. Without bothering to put it on properly, using it as a quick barrier between himself and the silver, he takes the mirror from the drawer and sets it back atop his desk, as out of the way as possible. Sternly and to nobody, he says, “I don’t have time for this.”

Then he fetches the file he was after to begin with.

 _Just a glimpse,_  says the voice that is his, satisfied with itself.

* * *

Martin’s day is an awfully long one. He supposes it’s probably the same length as the rest of his days, that there’s probably not a second supernatural entity interfering with his life, slowing the time. It’s unlikely that there would be two at once, isn’t it? But then, you never do know. It does  _feel_  like the day is going by more slowly than usual, and like maybe it’s doing it just to spite him.

The thing is, he stops into Jon’s office once or twice on a good day. It’s just to check on him, to see if he needs anything, especially since, really, he shouldn’t even be back to work yet, it’s too soon. (Neither should Tim, they both had the worst of Prentiss—but Martin worries less about Tim.) Today he hasn’t gone in at all, despite the constant urge, because he wants to know about the mirror, and also he doesn’t.

Either Jon will have seen nothing, and maybe that means the Archive is putting a crack in Martin at last (vouch for the soundness of his mind? ha!), or Jon will have seen  _something_ , and that’ll mean…he doesn’t know what that would mean.

He’s not sure which possibility frightens him more.

“You thought about showing your pen some mercy?” Tim’s voice startles him, and only then does he realize he’s been lost in thought and gnawing on his pen. He hopes Tim hasn’t been watching long.

“Oh,” he says, “er, just a little distracted. Were you looking for something?”

“Did you have the file on case…” Tim checks a notepad. “0150419? Just checking into a few things.”

“No.” Martin wipes his pen clean as inconspicuously as he can. “I thought Jon put it away, but you can check with him.”

“Right,” Tim says, giving him a look that’s probably not as critical as it feels. “Hey, Martin, take it easy, yeah?”

“Yeah,” Martin says. “You too.”

“You know me—always do.” Tim walks away, talking to himself under his breath. Martin scans the list of what he’s meant to do today; there’s not much left to the day now, but maybe he can check off one more thing. He draws a star beside ‘call Dean Street Jazz club’ and exchanges his pen for the proper file.

There’s a strong smell of cinnamon in the air, and for a moment he thinks Sasha must have come in with a coffee run, but she’s nowhere to be seen, and neither is anything that might smell of cinnamon, and Martin just has time to think  _That’s odd_ , because the Archive always smells mostly of old paper and dreams of damp, before his vision wobbles and  _shifts_ and he’s not altogether at his desk.

* * *

Martin is exceptionally fond of people as a rule—Cosy didn’t come about solely due to his love of experimenting with teas and coffees, after all, though that had its role to play—but he’s more than happy to return to his empty flat at the end of the day. His feet ache from rushing about and there’s a mysterious new stain on his trousers and he smells so strongly of chamomile he thinks it might be infused into his fingers, and it’s been a _fantastic_ day.

Most of his days are fantastic lately. He doesn’t miss how lucky that makes him.

His home greets him, as usual, with the smell of cinnamon. He’s home later than ordinary, but that’s all right, there’s nobody here to wait for him. Not even a pet, though lately he’s thought about adopting a cat, or maybe a budgie. The flat is quiet, several floors up in a peaceful neighborhood; he turns on the stereo, his typical choice of classical, and strains of piano populate the air to keep him all the company he needs.

Martin lingers beside the stereo while shedding his shoes, and then makes for his bathroom. He takes a hot shower, washing away the muscle soreness and the minor memories of stress. That woman from down the street, she’s something he’ll need to handle. He’ll pay her a visit tomorrow with a complimentary drink and a pastry; he’s not going to apologize for her experience, as Michael’s done nothing wrong, but he’ll make nice. She’s run her business far longer than he has his, and he has no interest in making enemies.

Nothing’s perfect.

Once he’s finished washing up and smells marginally less like he’s spent twelve hours being brewed to perfection, Martin slips into a comfortable pair of pyjamas and settles down in his favorite armchair with the newest edition of a poetry periodical he’s followed since his teenage years. He checks the time before he can get too engrossed; as he’s got to be back to Cosy at half-six, late nights are out of the question. But there’s always a little bit of time for reading. If he’s lucky, there’s also time for writing. There won’t be, tonight, but the way his evening ended…he can’t, won’t complain about that one bit.

He pages through, pausing at the submission guidelines to wonder if he’ll hear anything soon; he continues to rifle through till he comes to the poems he hasn’t read yet. The magazine would be easy to read in one sitting; he’s never done so. Poetry is a food that ought to be digested slowly, each bite savored. There’s a poem about the ocean or about fear, and another about the author’s struggle with anxiety alongside their love of theatre, and another about idyllic sunny days, authored by a homesick Australian.

The fourth, the last he has the time for tonight, waxes lyrical on the suddenness of human emotion, and just like that, there is a lump in Martin’s throat. The moment’s not lost on him, like he’s slid on an icy patch of melancholy. He closes his eyes and then he closes the periodical and turns off the stereo and goes to bed.

Martin’s not lonely, except for when he is.

Cosy is fulfilling, and Michael is worth a dozen friends on his own, and he’s incredibly, increasingly fond of his regulars (a morning without Sasha and Tim and Melanie is a desolate morning indeed), but none of that comes home with him. (That’s not entirely true, of course. The account books visit his flat regularly, and there’s no switch to stop his brain offering him new drink ideas, and it’s not as though he never has Michael over for a visit.)

He doesn’t choose to think about Jon then, but think about Jon he does. The first time Jonathan Sims and Gerard (“Gerry, please, only my mum calls me Gerard”) Keay visited Cosy, it was the second day of business. Martin distinctly remembers Gerry, with his dyed-black hair and an energy about him, shoving a much dourer man toward the counter and saying, “Get him something that’ll make him more tolerable—you haven’t got a coffee IV back there, have you?” He’d fixed up a raspberry and hazelnut concoction that Jon protested wanting any part of, but the first sip had gotten him to not only stop his complaining, but actually look content, and he’d looked at Martin the way most people look at lottery winnings. That had been nice.

That had been  _really_  nice.

But it was down to the drink, not to Martin himself, and there’s no reason for him to care either way.

Martin’s not sure what to make of tonight. There was Jon, stood in his café at closing, and Martin ought to have made him leave; but Martin’s not lonely, except for when he is. Besides: ‘I just found myself—’ Jon is prickly, and Martin doesn’t mind, but tonight Jon was less so, and Martin thinks maybe he had something to do with it. A cat, or a budgie; a  _person_  hadn’t really been up for consideration.

‘I do like your face.’ Martin smiles into his pillow. That was nice too.

* * *

The first thought Martin has is,  _His flat looks lovely. I should give mine a good cleaning._  There have obviously never been worms trying to get inside the other one. If there had, it would have been a better place to spend two weeks holed up. Not that there’s a  _good_ place for that; just, given the choice between his own flat and the other Martin’s.

That’s his first, not especially rational, thought.

His second, markedly more panicky, is,  _I’m not looking at the mirror. I don’t even_ have _the mirror. Jon has the mirror._

If it can do that—if it can just break into his mind at any time, that’s—the only thing that stops him whimpering is Sasha, stood a few feet away, scanning a row of reference texts they’ve borrowed from the Institute library on a somewhat permanent basis. He cradles his head in one hand. How’s he supposed to live his life when there’s another him living another life, and the other life, the happier life, gets to nose in on his day?

Maybe there’s a way to keep it out. Maybe Jon’s looked into it. Maybe Jon’s already come up with something.  _Definitely_  there’s not a chance he’s going to focus on anything else today. It’s nearly time to go home, anyway.

Martin looks about, and there’s Tim, standing back at his own desk. “Tim,” he says, “did you speak to Jon?”

Tim “mmhmms” without looking up from the list of phone numbers he’s perusing. Martin wonders if that’s proper work, or if it’s potential partners, or if Tim is mixing business and pleasure again, and immediately feels badly for it. Tim’s good at his work, even if he’s not always the most  _strictly professional_  about it. Maybe because of it. And it’s Jon’s job to worry about that, not his. Besides, Martin—no, no, he’s not going deeper into this rabbit hole just now.

“Was he in a good mood?”

At this, Tim looks up and says, too gravely, “I don’t think he’s heard of those.”

“Good…ish?” Martin asks, and Tim shrugs, and he keeps his exasperation to himself. “Better or worse than usual?”

Tim thinks for a moment. “Worse,” he decides.

“Ah.”  _Fantastic._ It’s not like he’s got much of a choice. He has to check in, not just on the mirror. He thanks Tim and approaches Jon’s office, rapping at the door before going in.

“Tim, I told you I don’t have—oh, Martin.” Jon looks unsurprised to see him. The mirror is facedown on the desk, and Martin swallows at the sight of it, though it doesn’t look like that’s what Jon’s been looking at, as there’s also a file folder laid out in front of him. They stare at each other for a long time, until Jon says a pointed, “What do you  _need_ , Martin?”

“Just checking if you need anything before I leave,” he says, and Jon shakes his head, and isn’t it obvious? “Or um, if you looked at the mirror again. Noticed anything like what I said.”

Jon’s next words are dredged out of him like a bloated corpse from the bottom of a lake. (That’s a horrid comparison. Martin has worked for The Magnus Institute for too long.) “There does seem to be something…out of the ordinary about it.”

“Oh!” Martin hopes he doesn’t sound too eager. “So you saw—”

Jon cuts him off. “I don’t know what I saw. It’s going to need more thorough investigation.”

“Oh,” Martin repeats. He hesitates. “Should we give it to the researchers?”

Half of him wants to take it back home with him. None of him wants to give it to the researchers. The latter is a guarantee that he’ll never interact with it again. Not that he’s positive that will make a difference at this point.

“No.” Jon looks as disgruntled by the thought as Martin feels. He hastens to add, “Not yet.”

“Should I…?” Martin waves toward the mirror, hoping that gets his question across without his asking properly.

“I’ll keep it here overnight,” Jon says.

“Don’t you think…” Martin only now thinks to look over his shoulder, pull the door shut, and lower his voice. “Don’t you think we should talk about it?”

“Yes.” Jon frowns. Martin’s not sure where it’s directed. Probably him. There is the mirror though, and maybe Jon likes that less. “I don’t think we should talk about it right  _now_.”

Martin has just started to step forward, but he stops at this. He wants to argue. Of course they should talk about it  _right_   _now_. The mirror has started to invade his mind! That’s a grand reason to talk about it  _right now_. But Jon—Jon looks incredibly tired, the dark circles under his eyes developing dark circles of their own, and pushing feels wrong. “Okay,” he says instead. “Then, um, are you sure you didn’t need anything?”

“Go home and get some rest, Martin.” This comes followed by a sigh.

“I’ll try,” Martin says with a smile he knows is at its most nervous. “Easier said than done and all, you know? You try to get some sleep tonight, too.”

Jon looks away. “I will.”

Martin doesn’t believe that for a second, but he leaves the Archive, wondering the entire way home just what Jon saw in the mirror.

* * *

Jon watches Martin leave with a growing sense of consternation. Martin had come in and he’d thought, not by choice, about the wrong Jon and the wrong Martin looking at each other, followed by the errant thought that Martin (this Martin, he supposes, though thinking too hard about it makes him want to throw his hands in the air) actually wasn’t unattractive, and that thought was certainly  _not_  his own. He shoots the mirror an absolutely venomous look.

“I’m not attracted to Martin,” he tells it, fully aware that it’s not going to respond. It probably can’t even hear him. It doesn’t give him the same sense that he has while recording statements, that he’s being watched and studied and dissected by some unseen force. It feels, for all intents and purposes, like any other hand mirror. It doesn’t care how he feels toward his assistant, whether it’s attraction or (more accurately) tolerance. He balances his chin on a fist and stares at it, weighing his limited options.

The Research Department is the most logical course of action, but once they’ve got their teeth into it, it’ll never enter the Archive again. He shouldn’t care, given it’s nothing more than a source of trouble and a building migraine; he does care, because against his better judgment, he wants to know more. The other, far more unwise path is to study it himself, which he doesn’t want to do. Except he does. Want to. The damned thing is like a siren.

“Damn,” he says, caught at an impasse, knowing his choice ought to be an obvious one.

It’s an hour later that the office door next opens, Jon having done little more than stare at the mirror, not sure what he’s waiting for, or if he’s waiting for anything. The newcomer says nothing until Jon looks up. Elias nods to Jon’s cluttered desk. “Working hard as usual, Jon?”

“I haven’t caught up from being out,” Jon says. It’s not a lie. The mountains of disorganized files hadn’t gotten any smaller in his absence. Without his direction, he’s rather unsure what his assistants were spending their time on. He hasn’t wanted to ask.

“Of course,” Elias says, and comes closer to study the contents of the desk. “I’m sure you’ve got plenty to do. Tell me about this mirror.”

There’s no reason not to tell the truth. No, that’s not quite right. There’s one reason: Jon doesn’t want to. “It’s nothing,” he says, dressing it up with a roll of his eyes. “Martin was concerned, but you know Martin.”

“Yes.” Elias makes a sound somewhere between interest and disapproval. “Yes, I know Martin.”

He lingers, an odd look on his face, for long enough that Jon finds himself uneasy. It could easily have been Elias who killed Gertrude; he might be considering the best way to be rid of Jon next. Jon clears his throat. “Was there something you needed?”

“I wanted to check up on you,” Elias says. “You’ve been going somewhat overboard since you returned to work. You’re still recovering, Jon.”

“So you all keep telling me.” It never ends.

Elias shakes his head. “Just don’t make it  _too_  late a night.”

“I planned to leave soon,” Jon says, though he planned no such thing.

“Yes,” Elias says again, sounding unconvinced. He strolls toward the door and glances over his shoulder. “Have a good night.”

“You as well.” Jon remains at his desk for several minutes more, his fingers wrapped around the edge of his desk. There’s not much in the way of reason for him to be here. He returns the mirror to the drawer, and makes his way home for what’s sure to be a poorly slept night. He doesn’t have any other sort, anymore.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ps I had planned like 7 more scenes for this chapter, but then it was suddenly 4k long already? so yeah, I stopped
> 
> pps I really would like to write a Christmas fic and am struggling to figure out details, so if anyone has any holiday wishes, I am listening


	4. grounded, dreaming

Martin wakes at three.

It doesn’t come as a surprise. Lately it’s almost more of a shock when he sleeps through an entire night. He’s drenched in sweat, and his blanket is twisted around his legs like a fishnet, or like a spiderweb he’s thrashed against and only become more entangled in. It takes several minutes for his breathing to even out. The lamp beside his bed is on, its bulb a warm glow of comfort. He hadn’t meant to fall asleep with it on; he wonders sometimes if there is a part of him that drags him to sleep before he’s flicked it off, so he will not wake in the dark, so he will  _see_ whichever monster comes for him next, in the moments before it takes him.

“I’d rather not, if it’s all the same to you,” he says to his subconscious, and almost laughs to think that this is his life now. Waiting for the monsters. The other Martin Blackwood, the Martin Blackwood who also writes poetry and probably has a father that never left and a mother who actually loves him, the happy Martin Blackwood,  _he_  probably doesn’t have this problem. He probably sleeps soundly and his nightmares are probably less likely to chase him with teeth courtesy of his day job, unless the customers get a bit rowdier than ordinary.

Martin fumbles for his glasses, works his legs free of his blanket and gets out of bed. Tea. He needs tea. Peppermint, maybe. But first he needs air. His bedroom window sticks in the corner, and he wrenches it open with such force he nearly tips himself over. The screen has already been taken out, the night he found Gertrude and woke trembling and crying and trying not to vomit; it lives on the floor now. He sticks his head out the window and inhales, slow and deep. It smells of fresh rain outside, and the streets are empty as far as the eye can see, and Martin’s fingers hold onto the windowsill like it will keep him grounded here in this moment of quiet, ordinary London. Grounded.

His thoughts turn again toward the mirror. How’s he supposed to stay grounded anywhere when there’s a supernatural, possibly (probably, as that’s just the world he lives in, now isn’t it?) evil mirror that can grab him at its leisure and foist him into another world, like it’s some sort of spectator sport. The new football.

There’s been nothing since he departed the Institute for the evening, which is a relief. If it took him while he crossed the street, or if it let him walk off the train platform, or… He shivers. There are lots of ways it might do him in. Even if it’s  _not_  evil.

Martin takes another breath, before he can get too caught up in another unpleasant train of thought. It’s begun to rain again, a light drizzle coming down on his head. He doesn’t mind it so much. It’s only water.

Still, he pulls back into his flat and shuts the window and goes into his kitchen.

 _The other Martin must wake up early,_  he thinks while leant on the counter waiting on the kettle to warm.  _Not this early. That would be stupid._

Then again, what does he know about operating a café? He’s never given thought to doing anything but whichever job will have him, whichever job will afford him the means to pay for his mother and himself; a café is a dream, a luxury, and it’s not for him.

But wouldn’t that be something? To have something to be proud of. Something that’s his like that.

“Keep on dreaming, Martin,” he says to himself, and he is dreaming, a little, and for a moment the room around him is wrong, and it is as much a surprise as waking at three.

* * *

 

Fifteen minutes to opening, Martin surveys the pastry case over his shoulder. He’s got a piece of chalk in one hand, the other bracing him for balance. Blackberry, lemon, and thyme muffins. Banana bread, with and without chocolate chips; he’s not sure of the point of the latter, but Michael knows what he’s doing. Zucchini bread and sticky buns. Apple turnovers. Lemon-lavender pound cake. He writes each item deliberately, pausing in between to step back and make sure the letters are straight.

“Michael,” he calls, “what hasn’t been brought out yet?”

“I have chocolate muffins.” Michael comes out of the kitchen with a full tray, which he begins to unload into the display. “And croissants. The scones haven’t finished yet, but there’s blueberry, maple oat nut, and lemon. Oh, and the strawberry-graham.” He ticks these off on his fingers as he says them, then pauses and adds, “I also made shortbread.”

“Are you sure you’re human?” Martin helps where he can, but baking is far from his specialty, and the amount Michael manages to produce each morning never fails to astound him.

Michael laughs, the way he always does. Though the business is Martin’s, the daily pastry menu is entirely up to Michael, who bakes what he’s in the mood to bake, though certain items are served daily and not written on the board; they’re always putting out more throughout the day, and it never fails to sell through. He returns to spacing out the pastry case. “Are you going to tell me about last night?”

The smile comes on without Martin’s say-so. “What about last night?” he says, finishing up the menu and wiping his hands off on a nearby wet rag. Their lunch menu, sandwiches and the like, remains the same from day to day.

“You know what about last night.”

Martin looks over the counter and through the front window, where there’s already a huddle of people waiting for their coffee. It’s like this every morning, and he really  _does_  need to bring on somebody else before they’re both run ragged, maybe two somebodies; one of them needs a day off, eventually. Jon and Gerry aren’t out there among the early arrivals, but he knows they’ll be along. “I didn’t make out with a customer after closing, if that’s what you’re wondering. Terribly unprofessional.”

Michael finishes in the display and straightens up. “You—”

“Not for lack of interest,” he tacks on.

“Martin!” Michael looks aghast.

“I’m joking, Michael.” Mostly. Sort of. He’d dreamed about it a bit. “Jon needed a quiet place to be, and I could give him that much for a little while, so I did.”

“After closing,” Michael says, and a timer sounds from the kitchen, and he gives Martin a look that indicates this conversation isn’t finished, but rushes off to take care of the scones.

Martin unlocks the door and greets the initial stream of customers, most of whom aren’t altogether awake yet, bound for early morning destinations. It’s an unremarkable start to his Tuesday. He prefers it that way. Tuesdays aren’t meant to be exciting. In between fixing drinks, he drafts a job posting.

It’s an hour after opening that a familiar dour face and a head of long dyed-black hair walk into the café. There’s somebody new with them today, a woman with brown skin and hair in tight curls. She’s laughing, and quite pretty, and has her arm linked with Jon’s, and there’s no reason for Martin to care about any of those things. (In his dream, Jon had been quite good at kissing.) He takes care of the bubbly university student he’s serving—black coffee, not what he expected of her—before sending her along to Michael. Then they’re in front of him at the counter, and he says, “Good morning Jon, Gerry, and I don’t believe we’ve met yet?” He’s pretty sure he’s smiling. His teeth are showing and everything.

“Georgie,” the woman says, her eyes drifting toward the case and growing saucer-like.

“Good morning, Georgie.” He hopes his eyes aren’t drifting, too, toward her arm in Jon’s. He wants Jon to say something. Maybe he regrets having come here last night and he’s brought along Georgie to make a point. But it was  _Jon_  who said he liked Martin’s face, and he doesn’t seem the sort to be so passive aggressive, so petty. Not that Martin knows him very well. Maybe he is the sort. “Welcome to Cosy. Let me know what you’re craving, or I can fix something I think you’ll like.”

“Right,” she says. “Are you Martin, or Michael?”

“Martin,” he says, surprised. “You’ve heard of me?”

“Only every day for the last four weeks. The way I hear it, you’re God’s gift to hot drinks.” She’s looking at him properly now, and he feels like the floor might drop out from under him, and also like that might not be such a bad thing. There’s something there that—he’s not sure if it’s good or bad. “They didn’t tell me you have maple scones.” She makes it sound like a betrayal of the worst sort. “Can I have one of those and a jasmine tea? Jon, you’re paying for me.”

“Oh, am I.” It’s the first thing Jon’s said this morning, and his voice is as dry as ever, but his lips twitch.

“I got out of bed for this,” Georgie says. “I’ve done my part.”

“You didn’t have to.” Gerry is also looking at Martin in an odd way, like he’s trying to read him, or pick him down to the bones for a painting. Is there something on his face? Did Jon go home last night and tell his friends (possibly girlfriend?) that the café owner treated him with too much familiarity last night? “We didn’t twist your arm. I’m sorry about her, Martin.”

 _They wouldn’t be here if Jon had a problem with last night,_  he thinks.

Martin rings up Georgie’s order, having no right to nor reason for the sinking feeling in his stomach. “Michael,” he calls, and relays Georgie’s request. “Gerry? Jon?”

“I’ve got her.” Gerry digs into his pocket for his wallet. “Jon can get his own. Same tea as always for me, but Michael, I’ll take whatever you’re proudest of today.”

Martin gives Gerry his total, and Michael arrives with Georgie’s scone, and Jon’s, and an apple turnover for Gerry. Georgie lets go of Jon, making a gleeful sound as she accepts her scone.

“Jon?” Martin says.

“Martin.” Jon shifts, looking suddenly uncomfortable, rubbing at his arm now where Georgie was hanging onto him. “Georgie wanted to see what all the fuss was about this place.” He pauses. “She’s a friend. Flatmate. We’re friends. I mean, we’re not…”

Gerry raises his eyebrows. “He’s not dating me either, if you weren’t sure.”

Jon says, “Shut up,” a hint of color in his cheeks.

Martin laughs to cover his relief. “Did you get any sleep last night, Jon?”

“Yes.” Jon’s looking directly at him, and opens his mouth to say something more.

“Move it along there,” someone calls, Tim, several people back in the growing line, with Sasha and Melanie. It’s playful, and a number of people laugh, Georgie among them, and Martin could kick himself for spending so long on a customer during the morning rush. “I’ve been looking forward to my espresso.”

“You’re a waste of Martin’s talents,” Sasha says. “Espresso, Tim, honestly.”

“I’m a simple man, Sasha,” he says.

“Everyone knows that,” Melanie says.

“Just surprise me,” Jon says. Martin nods, and then the transaction is finished, and Jon steps aside for the next customer, a lovely elderly woman who’s come in a number of times before, and then there’s a university boy who yawns every three words, and a middle-aged man who orders for five, and then Martin has Michael take over the till so he can set to work on actually  _making_ some of the drinks. He mentally shifts ‘hire somebody else’ to the topmost spot on his priority list.

He listens to Tim greeting Michael and placing his order, and luckily most of the drinks he’s making are on the simpler end. He hands Jon his drink, and Gerry, and the elderly woman, and carries on until he’s caught up as far as Tim and the ladies.

“Sorry I stepped on your moment there,” Tim says, accepting his usual muffin.

“My moment?” Martin is acutely aware of Jon sat across the café with Gerry, who’s not his boyfriend, and with Georgie, who’s not his girlfriend. He already knew the first; the second is more of a relief than it has any right to be.

“Tim,” Melanie says, “mind your own business for once.”

“I’d rather mind Martin’s,” Tim says, and raises his voice to add, “or I could mind Michael’s.”

There’s the immediate sound of a pen dropping onto the counter, followed by an apology.

“Tim,” Martin says, “d’you have to embarrass him? He’s the only employee I’ve got, I don’t need you getting him all out of sorts.”

Tim gives him a grin that’s not the least bit apologetic. “If you had a less cute employee, I wouldn’t have to embarrass him.”

“That’s all right,” Michael says without looking away from the customer in front of him, thankfully a regular who’s used to these antics. “I charged Sasha and Melanie’s orders to his card to make up for it.”

“I noticed.” Tim doesn’t sound upset. “You’ll have to try harder than that.”

Martin shoos the trio away and catches Jon looking at him. It feels nice, but he hasn’t got time to linger on the feeling.

* * *

The kettle is whistling.

Martin jumps, and swears, and sends a spoon clattering to the floor. He reaches for the kettle. Hopefully it hasn’t been going like this for long. The walls here aren’t especially thick, and he’d rather not hear from the neighbors.

There it is then. The mirror’s got him in its clutches and there’s nothing he can do about it. His stomach hurts. He doesn’t want tea after all. Instead he wanders to the bathroom in a daze. He turns on the water, hot as it’ll go, and strips down. The burn of the water pounding on his skin  _almost_  distracts him.

It’s not fair. He knows his own life is rubbish most of the time. He knows he’s hardly reaching for his full potential, working in the Archives underneath a man who doesn’t like him, who he likes too much, who makes his heart beat faster than any monstrous threat ever will. He knows this, and he knows more, and there’s no reason he should have to be confronted with a reality far greater than his own.  _It’s not fair._

Martin stays in the shower until the water runs cold, and when he gets out it’s easier to pretend he hasn’t been crying.

* * *

Jon wakes at five.

He’s spent his night tossing and turning, almost never properly asleep. He spends most of them tossing and turning, in fact. This one is no different. The trouble is the nightmares, which creep into his sleeping hours more nights than not, and he thinks that not all of them belong to him.

Jane Prentiss and her worms greeting him as he crept up from the tunnels; the tunnels themselves, pitch dark and winding and full of secrets; the body of Gertrude Robinson, frighteningly well-preserved in his imagination, carried from its unfortunate resting place; a desk caked in more blood than a person can lose and survive; the  _knock, knock_  that has haunted him since his childhood, with him all these years later,  _knock, knock_. These nightmares are completely his own.

But there is the empty, unending stretch of graveyard; there is the skin peeling back and the  _scrape_ of metal on metal; there are the formerly sterile tables covered in blood and the limbs that have forgotten how to be limbs; these things are not his, though they have been described to him in greater detail than he cares to reflect on in his waking hours. There are other nightmares brought on by his work (trees twisted evil and spider swarm apples, ink-water caverns and spaces confined-suffocating), but they are lesser in a way he can’t well—and does not care to—define.

He cannot recall, when he jars awake, which nightmares embraced him throughout the night, whether they belonged to him or to somebody else, but he remembers watching the wrong Jonathan Sims take a seat at his desk— _his_  desk, in the Archive—and he remembers watching Martin bring him a cup of tea; he’s not sure which Martin it was, as their smiles are the same. The alarm clock beside him is an unpleasant reminder that he’s awake an hour earlier than he needs to be. There’s no sense attempting to get back to sleep, so he fetches the book he’s been reading and settles down to learn something about the history of Spanish sailing vessels.

The learning doesn’t go as well as he hopes. He reads the same passage, about commonly sailed trade routes, a dozen times without absorbing more than a word or two at a time. His thoughts keep meandering, predictably and without so much as a by-your-leave, to the mirror in his desk drawer. He takes a moment to consider yelling into a pillow. In the end, he sets the book aside and goes to rifle through his bookcase for a fresh notebook.

He labels the top of the first page in neat handwriting: “Background Information.”

And then he begins to write. First, he puts down a thorough physical description of the mirror. Its silver frame and the matching figures touching palms on its back and the writing that bears further research. He notes where Martin bought the thing, and the date, though the charity shop is unlikely to have thorough enough records to tell them who donated it. He adds that its age is difficult to pin down, but that it must have been created a few hundred years ago. When he’s finished with this, he sets about writing what he has seen through it thus far. The differences in the wrong Jon, Jonathan Sims the graduate student. The office at King’s College and the pleasant little café called Cosy. The blond man called Michael, the other Georgie (it is difficult to think of _her_ as wrong), the paint-spattered Gerry…the other Martin Blackwood.

The Martin Blackwood who owns a café is different from the Martin Blackwood who spent long months living in the Archive; but he is also very much like him. The easy air of confidence about him is something he’s never seen from the Martin he knows, who is awkward and stammering. Bringing Jon tea and a sandwich, being there to take care of him, that’s the same; the wrong Jon hadn’t pushed back on his Martin’s gentle caretaking, and Jon, the Jon whose life is possibly a sick joke, he can only ever push back, push  _away_.

_You looked like you could use a friend._

The other Martin is less irritating.

_I do like your face._

 Jon’s fist tightens around his pen. He and the wrong Jon have that much in common.  _Flirting_  is as much a foreign language as French or long-dead Aramaic, and more useless to him than either. But maybe the Jon in the mirror doesn’t find it so useless; maybe he’d like to properly flirt with the Martin who allows him to sit quietly in his closed café. He writes everything he remembers of that conversation, and then the conversation with Georgie and Gerry. It’s important to put all of it down.

Someone laughs. It’s a familiar laugh, one he’s heard before, a long time ago and also very recently, a woman’s laugh. He looks about his living room in alarm. There’s nobody there. That’s not a comfort. Other voices come to his ears then, or—into his head? It is impossible to tell. His vision blurs and tears to the side, dark and then wrong.

* * *

Walking into Cosy in the morning plays at Jon’s nerves in a way it never has before. His mouth goes dry when he steps through the door with Georgie stuck to his side. At the sight of Martin behind the counter, his stomach somersaults so powerfully it might qualify for the next Olympics. This is ridiculous. Coming here has been a source of relaxation to him since Gerry first dragged him in; it’s not supposed to make him anxious. Then he made a damn fool of himself last night.

Martin’s smiling at him anyway, looks happy to see him. He looks happy to see him every morning. Happy to see  _everyone_  every morning, that’s his work. Jon’s not special. Right now Martin’s smile is directed not just at him, but at Gerry and Georgie too. There’s something odd about the smile though, something less natural and more plastered professional. Jon’s stomach twists again.

 _Say something,_  he thinks.  _He’s going to think you’re daft if you just keep staring at him like that._

Before he’s put together a sentence, Martin’s greeting them, and then Georgie’s talking to Martin, who’s looking at her, and also not looking at her. Georgie says, “Jon, you’re paying for me.”

“Oh, am I.” Jon’s not surprised to hear it.

“I got out of bed for this,” she says, and Jon works out exactly where Martin’s eyes are. Locked to the space where Georgie’s arm is linked through his. It’s something he hardly notices her doing anymore; she tends to stick to him when they’re out, or to Gerry, whoever’s nearest when she first reaches out, so men will assume she’s got a boyfriend and leave her be. Jon doesn’t mind, has never minded, but now there’s Martin, and he wishes Georgie had gone for Gerry today. “I’ve done my part.”

Jon’s not really listening now. Not until Martin says his name, says it with a question at the end. He realizes Georgie’s let go of him and walked down toward the other end of the counter. Rubbing his arm isn’t a conscious thing. He says, “Martin. Georgie wanted to see what all the fuss was about this place. She’s a friend. Flatmate. We’re friends, I mean, we’re not...”

He can’t work out what’s happening behind Martin’s eyes. People aren’t as easy for him as words on a page, characters whose thoughts he can annotate and analyze and understand. Maybe he mistranslated Martin before. That would make more sense, frankly. Martin has no reason to care about his relationship with Georgie, and several reasons to think Jon is both ill-mannered and an idiot.

But.

“He’s not dating me either, if you weren’t sure,” Gerry says, and Jon settles for telling him to shut up, as opposed to telling him to fuck off.

Then Martin laughs, and some of the tension in him loosens its grip. “Did you get any sleep last night, Jon?”

“Yes.” Not  _enough_  of it. But some. He wants to say something else; he’s not sure what it should be. He just wants to keep talking to Martin. 

Then another voice in line calls out, one Jon recognizes as belonging to another man who’s here as often as Gerry and himself, usually with a pair of women he’s seen around campus, and he tries very hard not to feel a flare of irritation. They  _are_  holding up the line. He tells Martin, “Just surprise me,” and moves on as soon as his card’s charged, and stringently ignores the interested looks he’s getting from both of his friends. He takes a bite of his morning scone. Michael’s at the register now, and Martin passes him a drink, he says another quiet thanks, but that’s all they’ve time for, before Martin whirls back to work.

“Can we sit?” Georgie looks around the café, tea in one hand and scone in the other.

“We usually don’t,” Gerry says, “but we can.”

“Excellent.” She walks off, leaving it up to them to follow her, another habit Jon’s used to. She installs herself at a table by the front, where they can watch the early morning street, and they both join her there.

As soon as Jon’s taken his seat, she lowers her tea and says, “Spill it, Jonathan.”

“Pardon?” Jon takes a drink of whatever it is Martin made for him, and the familiar taste of raspberry and hazelnut reaches his tongue—the first drink Martin ever served him. He glances toward the counter. Coincidence. Martin can’t possibly  _remember_  that. It’s been weeks and they serve so many people every day, and he only had it the one time. “I just paid for it, spilling would be a waste.”

Georgie shakes her head. “You said this is where you were last night, and what was that up there?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Jon says, though he does.

“You were oddly insistent that Georgie’s a friend,” Gerry says, removing the lid from his drink and taking a sip. “Didn’t want Martin to think you’ve got a girlfriend, Jon?”

“Whose side are you on?”

Gerry grins. The streak of red on his cheek stretches out. “The side that’s most entertaining for me.”

Jon rolls his eyes. Some best friend Gerry is. “It’s nothing.”

“It didn’t sound like nothing,” Georgie says. She tears off a piece of her scone and pops it into her mouth. Once she’s finished chewing, she adds, “I think it’s sweet. He let you stay when they were closed.” Here she goes a bit sing-song. “You like him, Jon. Go on and ask him out.”

“I’m not going to—” Jon looks out the window, at a woman walking her dog. “I’ve been reliably informed that’s a terrible idea.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I don’t know how to be in a relationship,” Jon says, like he’s reciting something from a textbook. “I’m uncaring, I don’t know how to put anyone else first, and I’m too far up my own ass to properly love another human being.”

“Oh. Right.” Georgie gives him a sheepish smile. “I may have been a bit dramatic?”

Jon shrugs. “I was a bastard.”

Gerry, who’s heard the minuscule details of every row Jon and Georgie ever had, between the two of them, says, “Was?”

“I have no idea why I’m friends with you.”

“Nobody else will tolerate you,” Gerry chirps.

“Do me a favor,” Jon says, “and piss off.”

“I like this chair.”

Georgie laughs. “All right, Jon, yes, I did say all that and I meant it at the time and I will never date you again, but you’ve gotten better and I really think you should ask him out.”

Jon sighs. “Surely you have something better to do with your time than worry about my love life.”

“I really don’t,” Georgie says, unperturbed.

“You should find something.”

Georgie gives a long, “Hmmm,” and then pushes her chair out, taking her tea with her to the counter. She flags down Michael, who looks over his shoulder at Martin and calls him over before taking his place at the register.

Jon’s heart rate picks up. “What is she doing?”

“It’s Georgie,” Gerry says. “Not even I can predict her.”

“You don’t think she’s—” Georgie is smiling. Georgie is laughing. Georgie is indicating Jon, or Gerry, or both of them, and Jon has to look away, down at his coffee. He takes a long drink. Then another. It scalds his tongue and is delicious and makes him want something he can’t put together.

Georgie arrives back at the table and announces, “I’ve got an interview at eleven.”

Gerry’s eyebrows knit together. “You what?”

“I’ve been thinking about finding a job.” She resumes her seat at the table. “You said it’s just the two of them running this place. I have generously volunteered my time.” She raises her tea cup to Jon. “And I can worry about your love life while being paid.”

“You’re too kind,” Jon says flatly.

* * *

Jon hurls his notebook across the room. It doesn’t go as far as he’d like. The pen hits the wall with a more satisfying  _thud_.

The mirror isn’t in his hand. The mirror isn’t in his flat. The mirror isn’t in the  _same building_. The mirror is far away, in a different part of London, in his desk at the Archive; he’s just seen through it anyway.

“What the hell,” he says, sounding far more calm than he feels, “am I supposed to do with that?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to everyone who's commented, subscribed, and left kudos! I appreciate all of you. This fic has...a long way to go (20 chapters = a probably inaccurate estimate), and I hope you'll stick with me through it :)
> 
> Next update 12/2!


	5. the problem at hand

Waking comes on slowly.

It always does. Every time.

Waking is rare.

It’s touch that does it, lights a spark through cold, unfeeling silver.

They don’t all call; or they do, but they are not loud enough, or they are not desperate enough, or they are not disparate enough. They are not enough, usually.

But, sometimes.

Sometimes there is enough to reach through a yawning void and find another way.

Sometimes, the mirror breathes.

* * *

 

Martin very nearly stays home. He hasn’t eaten breakfast, his stomach making idle threats when he dares think of anything heavier than an herbal tea. If he stays in his flat, he’ll be safe no matter when a vision comes on. His phone is in his hand, his fingers poised to type up an excuse for Jon, but…well, he’s spent more than enough time in his flat. Trapped there with his dully faded white walls and terror running a constant current through his veins, through his nerves, through his life.

He shoves his phone into his pocket and announces to whatever might be listening, “I am not being held hostage here again.”

And so what if his voice is higher and shakier than he might like? He’s said it, and that, he thinks, makes it true. He squares his shoulders and walks out into a grey London morning.

* * *

It takes long minutes of silent seething—following a full minute of unseemly cursing—for Jon to cross the room and gather up the notebook, the pen. Each step along the way is deliberate, taken alongside a sequence of thoughts that come to his mind in a more orderly fashion than he expects them.

 _The mirror is at the Institute._ His notebook is open on the floor, the pages bent from their awkward landing. He picks it up and frowns at his notes.

 _I don’t need to handle the mirror in order for it to take hold._  He flips the notebook shut.

 _It might have done the same to Martin._  There’s a matter for addressing later. At his desk, with Martin across from him, no doubt giving Jon a look like he’s got all the answers. He makes a derisive sound and collects his pen.

 _Gertrude Robinson was murdered._  It’s far from a new thought, that last one, but it’s one he can’t let go of, no matter what else the universe deigns to throw at him. The circumstances haven’t changed. (They have, of course, but not considerably enough to alter what has to be his course of action.)

Jon sits down to write out the details of his last vision; and then he goes to work.

* * *

The Magnus Institute is always quiet, the sort of place where over-loud shoes are frowned upon. Often in a quite literal sense. Often by Jon.

First thing in the morning, when few people are making their way through the halls, the building is at its quietest. It’s not yet seven when Jon enters his office, his notebook more crumpled now from having been crammed unceremoniously into his shoulder bag.

He ignores the mirror. He does so  _pointedly_ , as though it will feel his disdain through the desk and its ears will droop like a scolded puppy’s. It’s irrational, but it feels good, as irrationalities so often do. Instead of pulling the mirror free for examination, he puts himself to work. Proper work, as he’s not sure what to do about Gertrude at the moment. There’s not a reason to fear that her murderer intends to do the same to him. Not necessarily. But she was the Head Archivist; now he is the Head Archivist, and any reason to kill one Head Archivist is easily carried over to the next. The thought makes little sense even as he thinks it. There may have been plenty of reasons for somebody to want Gertrude dead that have nothing whatsoever to do with her position.

But, killed in the tunnels below the Institute.

But, killed in the line of duty. (It comes back to him often, the way Elias said that; he can’t recall, quite. Thoughtful? Resigned? Amused?)

But, killed in cold-blood. She wouldn’t have been left there if her killer felt remorse.

 _She was killed, and she was the Head Archivist._ Jon cannot help but circle back to this point, time and again. Another irrationality, he supposes, and this one far less enjoyable. If it keeps him alive, what does it matter?

Jon pages through statements, sets one to record onto his laptop, and does his level best to focus.

 _You’re ignoring the problem at hand,_  says the voice that belongs to him.

 _This is the problem at hand,_  he argues, fully aware of the futility of a fight against himself.

 _The mirror,_  it says, he says; that’s all.

“I ought to smash the thing and be done with it,” Jon says, knowing he won’t. There’s too much curiosity gnawing at his gut. He needs answers. Smashing it may not resolve anything, anyhow. Not with it reaching him across London. His eyes drift from the floorboards to the desk drawer and away again. He takes the notebook from his bag and skims where he left off. The wrong Jon’s most recent visit to Cosy. The wrong Jon’s  _pining_. There’s a flicker of motion behind his eyes, and then he is somewhere else.

* * *

Tuesdays are a significant improvement over Mondays. No useless foundational students; Tuesdays are  _his_. True, Jon does have a pile of essays yet to be marked, but he doesn’t have to watch them blatantly ignore his lectures and later answer questions they’d know the answers to if they’d been listening the first time. Upon arrival in the closet that is his office, his arms weighted down with books hauled from the library (while Ms. Robinson gave him a fond, familiar smile), he considers finishing up with the marking.

Then he settles into his chair and reaches for a book that smells as old as it looks, the title on its side faded into illegibility. He selects, too, a binder already thick with research and a dozen beginnings to his dissertation, ranging from a paragraph to a handful of pages, none of them satisfactory. The book has a satisfying heft in his hands; it promises him a thorough analysis of fairy tales, nursery rhymes, old wives’ tales, and all their like throughout nineteenth century England.

Jon sinks into the text the way another man might sink into a hot bath. Books are comfortable, full of sentences he can take his time soaking in. It’s easy for him to lose track of time when he reads. It always has been; his grandmother must have found him asleep with a book fallen onto his face more mornings than not.

“I can’t tell if you’re breathing,” a voice says.

Jon jumps, the book hitting his desk with a  _thunk_  that echoes more than it ought. “Christ,” he says, scowling at Gerry between stacks of books. “How long have you been there?”

Gerry’s eyes drag up to the wall clock. His head tilts thoughtfully, hair falling over his eyes. After careful consideration he says, “About ten minutes.”

“Why didn’t you  _say_ something?” Jon’s demand is less irritable than it could be, and not at all surprised. It’s not the first time Gerry’s snuck into his office while he was too absorbed to notice the sound of the door.

“I wanted to see if you’d notice this time.” Gerry’s lips twitch. “One of these days I’m going to paint you while you’re like this. Bet I can finish the entire piece without you looking up.”

“I’m so glad my diligence amuses you.”

“Is that the word you use?”

Jon’s fingers flick absently through page corners. “Shouldn’t you be teaching? I’ve seen your syllabus. There weren’t any dates carved out to come here and harangue me.”

“Ah, but there were,” Gerry says, flipping through the pile of Shakespeare essays, eyebrows knitting closer and closer together. “You didn’t notice because I cleverly disguised them as ‘artistic excursions.’” Here he spares a hand for air quotes. “Thought that sounded pretentious enough to throw you off my trail. I’ve got them all out looking for interesting bushes to paint.”

“Interesting bushes,” Jon echoes. He resolves to locate the copy of Gerry’s syllabus he knows is floating about his room, just for a sense of how often he ought to expect these little intrusions. It’s not that he minds; he’d prefer to avoid the early heart attack Gerry’s trying to cause him.

“It doesn’t have to be a bush.” Gerry pulls a hand through his hair. “It has to be something they don’t think anyone else would notice. And they have to give me a page on why they chose it.”

“I’m not marking them for you,” Jon says.

“I don’t plan to mark them at all. I just want to make them think about what they’re doing.” He stretches, still holding onto an essay, and says, “Come out of your cave for lunch.”

“I like my cave.” But Jon is already pushing his chair out and marking his place in the book, searching for his keys in the disorder of his desk.

Gerry grins. “I’m thinking that little Greek place.”

Jon checks that his wallet is in his pocket and nods, and waits for Gerry to return the essay to its place before ushering him toward the door. Outside of the office—a surprisingly soundproof place, tucked into a back corner—the building is a host of activity. Other offices are open in invitation, students are gathered in clusters, bent over work or idly chatting, hovering outside of not-yet-emptied classrooms, filling the air with a low hum. Jon prefers the cloistered sanctuary of his office, but he cannot deny there’s a solace in knowing the world around him is full.

“So,” Gerry says as they navigate around a group having an energetic debate about Lovecraft’s work and unsubtle racism, “how d’you think Georgie’s doing?”

“I dread to think.” They’d parted ways after Cosy, Jon and Gerry making their way to campus while Georgie navigated to the nearest park to take advantage of the cloud-free skies until her interview…after which she’d texted them, ‘Introducing your new favorite barista’ followed by a series of coffee emoticons. Gerry replied with, ‘I think Jon’s a bit married to his favorite.’ The set of lips Georgie sent in response to  _that_  had done nothing but rile Jon’s stomach.

“If it helps,” Gerry says, “I doubt she’ll outright offer Martin your hand in marriage.”

“You never know with Georgie,” Jon says. Martin’s laugh plays in his head, the way he laughed last night, which really shouldn’t affect him the way it does; it’s only a laugh, and it’s only a smile, and he’d like to drown in it.

“Oh, hold still, I need to get a picture of this.” Gerry’s phone is already in his hand, coming up to snap a photo.

“What are you talking about?”

“The way you’re smiling, I’ve got to get a record.”

Jon scowls and stalks ahead toward the doors, listening to Gerry behind him, still laughing at his own joke. He slows at the sight of a well-dressed man, dark hair silvering, holding a conversation with another professor. The man spots Jon at the same time and offers him a smile, excusing himself from the conversation he’s in.

“Dr. Bouchard,” Jon says, hand raising to greet his adviser.

“Jon,” Dr. Bouchard returns. “I’m surprised to see you  _leaving_  the building this early in the day. Don’t tell me you’re giving yourself a break during the week for once.” There’s a hint of teasing in it; Dr. Bouchard is as persistent in telling him he works too hard as Gerry and Georgie.

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” he says.

“I would.” A color-flecked hand comes down on Jon’s shoulder, Gerry planting himself at his side. There’s a flicker of distaste on Dr. Bouchard’s face, there and gone again so fast you might think it imagined, but he’s never liked Gerry, who’s best friends with his prize pupil, who’s not formally qualified to teach, who’s doing it anyway because he’s been a darling of the art world since age seventeen, who’s had the university president tripping over herself to make him happy for years, who’s covered in tattoos and a permanent layer of paint. “Someone’s got to remind him the sun is out there. We were heading to lunch.”

“Don’t let me stop you,” Dr. Bouchard says, and adds in a way that might be friendly, “Try not to get paint on anything. Professor Keay.”

A lazy smile works its way across Gerry’s face. It’s all Jon can do not to sigh; Gerry finds far too much pleasure in Dr. Bouchard’s dislike. “Not to worry,” he says, “it’s all dry. Want to check for yourself?”

Dr. Bouchard’s face twitches. “That won’t be necessary. Enjoy your lunch. Jon, my office on Friday?”

“Yes, I’ll see you then,” Jon says, and watches Dr. Bouchard walk away. He waits until they’ve made it outside to release the sigh, which is also a laugh. “Why do you do that?”

Gerry shrugs, but the smirk hasn’t left his face. “Not my fault it’s so easy to get under his skin.”

The Greek restaurant is on the opposite side of the campus. It takes an age to walk there, given the way Gerry likes to stop and soak in their surroundings; he insists it’s part of his artist’s charm, and Jon agrees, though he wouldn’t dare tell him so. Jon glances at his phone during one of these interludes. Several more texts have arrived, including ‘Martin is the sweetest person I have ever met’ and ‘Jonathan Sims I’ve found your real life fairy tale.’ (These are followed by, ‘All right technically you found him first’ and ‘The point is you don’t have to bury yourself in the fictional ones!’) Jon sends, ‘Please do not ruin my life,’ and only realizes he’s also said this aloud when Gerry says, “It’ll be fine.”

“Easy for you to say.” Jon slips his phone back into his pocket. “I haven’t—”

“Dated anyone since Georgie? I know, I’ve been here the whole time, Jonny boy.” Gerry arches an eyebrow at him. “So you do like Martin.”

“Maybe. I don’t know. Probably.” Martin’s laugh is in his head again. Jon makes a hopeless gesture. “Yes.”

* * *

Jon presses the heels of his palms into his eyes. His thoughts tumble over each other, every individual point of consideration fighting its way toward the front only to be crushed beneath the tide. He forces himself to takes a deep breath. To remove his hands from his face. To pick up a pen. To write his thoughts onto neat lines, into a more rigid, manageable order.

The first: the wrong Jon’s adviser, Dr. Bouchard. Dr. Elias Bouchard. No visible difference between him and The Magnus Institute’s own Elias Bouchard. The Elias who came sniffing around, asking about the mirror last night. Is it possible he knows something? There’s no reason to think so, or no more than before. Elias’ expertise in the esoteric is unparalleled, yes, but Jon has no interest in bringing the mirror to his attention after assuring him it was nothing. It will be taken from him if he does. There’s no doubt as to that. Last night may have been idle curiosity about the first new item on Jon’s desk, or he may know something of—what, inter-dimensional, voyeuristic mirrors? Either way, Jon intends to keep this artefact strictly between himself and Martin for now.

The second: time. Several pieces of it. There’s no way of telling how long these visions take in his own world. Perhaps they are instantaneous, any amount of vision spanning no more than a blink. Perhaps for every ten minutes that pass in a vision, one minute passes here. Perhaps there is no rhyme nor reason to it. He cannot simply stare at the clock and will himself to have a vision and check the time taken. Can he? He shakes the thought off for a later occasion. There’s also the matter of the passage of time on the other side of the mirror. It isn’t aligned with the passage here, that much is obvious, and there seems a lack of consistency in how far ahead the other side runs.

 _The other side. Hmph._ There’s got to be a neater way to address the place. ‘The other side’ sounds as though he’s referring to something dead. He frowns at himself, recenters, and continues.

The third: the trigger for the visions, if there is one. It’s difficult to think, reflecting on his own state of mind prior to being overtaken by the mirror, if there was a shared thread to connect the moments. It can’t be as simple as thinking about the damned thing.

The fourth: the contents of this particular vision. This is the easiest part to write out. The part that is simply, ‘this is what happened.’ Leaving aside that he still has no idea who this Gerry is…Jon stills. Professor Keay. Gerry Keay. Jon casts his eyes about his office, but no, he hasn’t got any of the relevant files in here. He begins to stand, and freezes again at the sound of jostling from the Archive proper.

His eyes flick toward the clock. It’s time for his assistants to be arriving for the day. There’s no cause for alarm. There’s a rapping at his door.

When it opens, it’s only Tim stood in his doorway, hair disheveled in a way that Jon has begun to think is strategic, a steaming mug in one hand. “Morning, boss,” he says, saluting Jon with his mug, “ready for another exciting day of monsters? There’s coffee, if you want any.”

“Thank you, Tim,” Jon says, easing back into his chair. Tim is already walking away, whistling a tune that sounds discomfitingly like ‘A-Hunting We Shall Go.’ Jon could almost laugh. Almost. He’d prefer not to go rifling around the Archive with Tim there, with Sasha and Martin likely to arrive at any moment, all of them ready to ask what he’s looking for, how they can help, Martin at his elbow telling him to go sit down, he shouldn’t be walking, his forehead creased with aggravating worry. No. It will have to wait. But still—Gerry Keay. There’s every possibility…

Jon spends the next ten minutes forcing his thoughts from the mirror. He sifts through his desk, moving the jar that is supposedly Jane Prentiss from one corner to another, straightening a collection of case files that have begun to teeter dangerously, listening to the sound of Tim shuffling about the next room. He bats away a flitting thought about Jonathan Sims, jumbled desks, and universal constants. He hears Sasha arrive, hears them talking about the wind, and stops listening.

It’s minutes, at best, before Martin says, “Jon? Is now a good time?” and pauses, and then, “Good morning, I mean,” and Jon wants to ignore him until he goes away, but that won’t solve anything. Besides: Martin will likely stand there, waiting, for as long as it takes for Jon to acknowledge him. Besides: theirs is a conversation that needs having.

So he raises his eyes. Martin looks wretched, his hair damp and his eyes rimmed with red, and he’s shivering. “Are you busy? I can come back later, if that’s better, but…”

Jon lets out a long breath. “Shut the door, Martin.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> These scenes insist on being longer than I mean them to. Someday a date will happen. Someday.


	6. what to do

Martin is beginning to regret not stopping to make tea before this conversation. The thought did cross his mind as he crossed the threshold of The Magnus Institute in a rush, his smile to Rosie less than usual, painted on. But stopping, waiting for the water to boil, waiting for the tea to steep properly…he just couldn’t. Not today. Probably wouldn’t have made it downstairs without broken ceramic and puddles, anyway. But it would give him something to do with his hands.

As things stand, he sits across from Jon with his fingers picking thoughtlessly at the chair beneath him. It’s probably expensive. Probably an antique. Probably something Elias would tell him off for ruining.

This morning he’d thought,  _I have to talk to Jon,_  and he’d thought,  _I want to hold the mirror again,_  which was awful and ridiculous and true, and he’d thought,  _I should be more afraid, afraid is more sensible than sad._ Sad is lengths ahead of afraid on the track, sensibility aside. Sad doesn’t stop him wanting to know more.

Now it’s just him and Jon, neither of them saying a word. The mirror sits on the desk between them, atop the rest of Jon’s work. It’s only the chair defacement stopping Martin from reaching for it. Jon looks as well as Martin feels, though he’s not shaking the way Martin is, and his pallor hasn’t been anything but deathlike since he returned to work, so the cast of grey is nothing new; Martin wishes Elias had forced Jon to stay out longer, except then who would he have gone to? Not Elias, no. He doesn’t like the way Elias looks at people. Not Tim or Sasha, who he trusts, but who feel less sturdy, somehow, and that’s ridiculous as well, because sometimes—often, always—when Martin looks at Jon, he worries the Archivist is cracking, shattering, just doing it very slowly. He worries they’re all going to shatter, eventually. He worries he doesn’t know how to put them back together.

Tim’d probably make a Humpty Dumpty joke. The thought is nearly enough to make Martin’s lips twitch.

Jon clears his throat. “Tell me again.”

Martin blinks at him. “Sorry?”

“Before you brought the mirror to me,” Jon clarifies. “You said you found it in a charity shop, and that you saw another Martin. Tell me again. Be more specific.”

“Oh.” Martin’s eyes drop back to the mirror. “You want a statement?”

“It’s not a statement.” Jon’s voice is calmer than Martin expected. Steady. “Just tell me what you can.”

“Right.” Martin nods. “I spent part of my day in Keston—I like to visit the pond, and it was a nice day for that sort of thing—and while I was out I decided to do a little bit of shopping. I’ll have to check the name of the charity shop, it wasn’t one I’d been to before. It seemed nice though, and I just thought I’d have a look around. I was hoping for poetry. I didn’t find anything I wanted, but I didn’t want to waste the stop and besides, it was just me and the clerk in the shop, so it felt awkward to leave without buying something.”

These probably aren’t the sort of details Jon was asking after. He’s rambling, he knows he is. Giving half a statement no matter. But the shaking has begun to subside. “The mirror caught my eye, and when I had a good look at it, my reflection was just a little different.”

The scar. The just-neater hair.

“I couldn’t well leave it after that. I did think about it. Tried telling myself it was my mind playing tricks, but I must have worked here too long to convince myself it wasn’t supernatural. You’d think that would have scared me off. Maybe part of me thought it would be better off here, I dunno.”

“How many times did you look?” Jon’s avoiding looking at the mirror, Martin realizes. He hasn’t spared it a glance since laying it between them. Is that intentional? Probably. Either way, it means Jon’s got his eyes locked on Martin, which makes him feel a bit scrutinized. Like Jon’s trying to poke holes in him the way he does statements. Except Jon knows the truth of this one.

“Counting that time,” Martin says, “twice. I had my second look at home, and that’s when I had my first full, erm, experience. I wasn’t looking at the mirror when that happened. I’d taken a look and seen the café. I put it down on my lap while I was trying to absorb that it was real, and I was looking at the wall, and then I was  _really_  seeing his world. It was the morning rush, and there was some horrid woman berating Michael—have you seen Michael?—and Martin was being patient with her, and that Melanie King woman was waiting on her drink. She was there with Sasha and Tim. You—er, I mean, not  _you_ —came in near the end, with another man I don’t know, someone called Gerry, and then I was back in my bedroom. Suppose I never left. But I felt like I was there. That was—oh, no, three times, I guess? I glanced before I brought it in yesterday morning, just for a second.”

The other Martin’s open smile nudges into his thoughts. He digs his fingers into the chair and goes quieter. “But I’ve seen the…the other place,” what else is he to call it? “since I left the mirror here. With you.”

There’s a flare of something in Jon’s eyes. Recognition? “How many times has that happened?”

“That’s twice so far as well.” Martin remembers the sudden smell of cinnamon, heady and not-supposed-to- _be_. “I was here, the first time. It wasn’t long after I gave you the mirror. The other Martin had gone home. He read some poetry and then he went to bed.” It’s so like his own routine that it aches.

“And then?” Jon prods.

Martin starts; he must have stopped talking for longer than he realized. “And then I woke up at three this morning and I saw him opening up the café with Michael. The other Jon came in with his friend later on. There was a woman, too. Georgie, I think she said.” He makes no mention of the other Jon’s haste to mention that he wasn’t dating Georgie, nor of the relief he’d gleaned from the other Martin. He hopes he’s not blushing. “So I guess that means we don’t need to have it on us to see through it.”

Jon says an unhappy, “Yes, I’ve had much the same discovery.”

“Have you?” It’s not a surprise. Well. It’s not as much of a surprise as it might otherwise be. “So…what have you seen, then? How much?”

Jon’s mouth pulls into a hard line. “Four times.”

The words come heavy, like he’d rather not be saying them. Martin wonders, with no intention of asking, if it’s more to do with him, or if it’s about the mirror. It could well be both.

“I didn’t plan to look, you know. I thought I would placate you, tell you I had and be done with it.” His mouth twitches in a way that might be amusement, might be irritation, is definitely reticent. “I thought it was  _nothing_. I suppose that’s not how things work down here anymore.”

All of his excuses, all of his logical explanations; Prentiss still came to attack them.

“I looked,” Jon sighs. His eyes still haven’t left Martin. “The first thing I saw was a Jonathan Sims who is not me sat in an office that would better serve as a broom closet at King’s College. I saw him marking essays. I saw him leave, and I felt his exhaustion.” He pauses, considers. “That may have been mine. It’s difficult to tell. I saw him make his way to the café owned by a Martin Blackwood who was not you. They were closed. That Martin invited him to stay.”

He stops, in an incomplete way. Like he’s processing, thinking what else he’d like to say. Martin doesn’t press. He didn’t give every detail of his own; he doesn’t need every detail of Jon’s. What matters is they’re talking about it at all. He gives Jon the time he needs, and then he realizes, “Oh. That explains it.”

Jon’s brow furrows. “Explains what?”

“The other Martin,” he says, “kept thinking about ‘last night,’ and I got a bit of it, but not anything specific. You know how it is, I guess.”

“Yes,” Jon says, “I know.”

It’s a moment before he goes on.

“I put the mirror away, but I accidentally touched it again when I needed to get something from underneath it. This time the Jonathan Sims who is not me was at home, in the living room with his flatmates. Georgie, who you saw in the morning, and Gerry, who it turns out is a very messy painter.”

This, finally, summons a proper smile from Martin. Even a bit of a laugh. It’s a relief to find he can do that right now. “You’d hate that.”

“The other one doesn’t seem to mind,” Jon says. “Not much. But he’s not me. His life is simpler.” There’s a smile on his face as well. It’s not a kind smile; it thinks little of the other Jonathan Sims. Then Jon’s shoulders dip, and he looks, if possible, more tired than before.

“I saw through it in my flat this morning, sometime after five. The same thing you saw, I believe. Jonathan Sims and his flatmates at the café. The last time,” he says, with a frustrated sound that says he knows it’s not the  _last_  time, “I was here. I hadn’t taken it from the drawer. But I saw him in his closet again, this time being pulled away by Gerry for a lunch break.” He pauses. “They’re quite good friends.”

Three times for me, Martin thinks, and four for Jon. With the mirror or without it. He should have gone to a different charity shop. He should have stayed out of Keston, found somewhere else to spend his Sunday. But he hadn’t, and there’s nothing to be done about it now. He says a weak, “Never a dull moment.”

Jon says, “Have you noticed a pattern in the times the mirror has affected you without it being on your person?”

“Not really?” Martin puzzles over this for a moment. At his desk. In his flat. “I guess I was thinking about it, but I don’t see it every time it crosses my mind, that would be—all the time.”

“Of course,” Jon says, thoughtful and dissatisfied, like he hadn’t expected Martin to present a great revelation, but was hoping for one nevertheless. “Quite right.”

Martin hesitates before asking a question of his own. “Have you seen anybody else we know?”

Jon frowns and rests his chin on the back of clasped hands. “Gertrude’s alive.”

“Oh?”

“I assume so. I arrived late to it, didn’t see her or catch a first name, but the librarian at King’s is a woman called Ms. Robinson. I doubt that’s a coincidence.”

“Unlikely,” Martin agrees. He hadn’t known Gertrude well before she passed. They crossed paths, of course, but she was about as social as Jon, not one to attend the holiday party.

“Elias,” Jon goes on, “is that Jonathan Sims’ adviser. For his dissertation. And there’s an old friend.”

“Is that Gerry or Georgie?” It’s not his business, but it’s asked before he can think better of it.

“Georgie,” Jon says, and for a moment there’s something on his face like—like the echo of affection. “We were friends in university.”

Friends. All right. Martin isn’t going to press that issue, either. That’s  _really_  not his business. “You don’t know Gerry, then?”

“I’ve never met him.” It’s the truth, Martin thinks, but possibly not the whole of it. “Do you know Michael?”

“No.” Martin shakes his head. He finds it a bit mystifying, actually. There are so many people they do know. But the person closest to his…doppelganger, counterpart, alternate reality self, whatever he might call it: the person closest to him is somebody he’s never heard of. “I don’t know him.”

Without noticing, he’s stopped picking at the chair. It occurs to him, a bit distantly, that he must have calmed down somewhere along the path of their conversation. It helps, to be discussing the mirror with somebody else. With somebody who understands. With Jon. They’ll have this sorted out. And if they don’t—better unsorted and working together, isn’t it? He says, “So what do we do?”

“I don’t know if there’s much we can do.” Jon sounds displeased with his own answer. “I’ve been writing down what I see. You should do the same.”

“All right.” Martin is glad, though he doesn’t say so, that Jon hasn’t suggested breaking the mirror. Adding more cracked and shattered things to the Archive. It’s impossible to say what would happen, were the mirror to break. Maybe, as they don’t need to touch it now, or  _it_  doesn’t need to touch  _them_ , its power is tethered to them and the mirror itself is unnecessary. Maybe it wouldn’t change anything. Maybe it would change everything, and they would never see through to this other, better universe ever again.

He doesn’t want to stop seeing it. Not really.

Jon speaks again. “You should try the charity shop. I doubt they’ll have kept any useful records, but there’s no harm in asking. See if you can learn anything about where it came from.”

Martin nods. Charity shops don’t often have records of their smaller donations—he’s learned that well enough, working down here—but if it came from a particularly generous benefactor, or from a regular donor, or if the shop’s owner is unusually scrupulous, they might have something. “I’ll check around the library, too. See if we have anything useful about mirrors or…alternate reality?”

The look they’ll give him if he asks for that. It’s hardly the most outlandish thing they’ve heard of, but still.

“Do you suppose we should write down when we’re seeing the other place?” Martin asks. “It doesn’t match up.”

In every sense, it doesn’t match up. It’s never the same time in the other Martin and Jon’s world that it is in their own; and he saw their world around three in the morning, while Jon saw some of the same bits several hours later. It’s like a poorly-made jigsaw. Or two poorly-made jigsaws, trying to overlap.

“Yes,” Jon says, and Martin is sure that if Jon sounds impressed, it is only his imagination. “You’re right. Always include that. And if you notice any similarities in the times that it—takes you, write that down as well.”

He stops. Silence, again, until he says, “I think it goes without saying that we keep this between us. At least for the time being. I don’t want to hand it off to the researchers just yet, and if anybody else catches wind of it…”

Ever, Martin thinks. He doesn’t want to hand it off to the researchers ever. Aloud, he says, “I won’t say anything to anybody. But I don’t think we should keep it here.”

“A safe deposit box, perhaps.” Jon’s eyes finally drop to the mirror. There’s a glint of distaste in his eyes, and something else Martin can’t place. “I’ll take care of that.”

“Okay.” Martin glances at the clock. They’ve only been talking for twenty minutes, maybe thirty, which feels so little for something of this magnitude, but they  _have_  covered all there is to cover for the moment. “Suppose I’ll just go?”

Jon doesn’t reply, and Martin takes that as an answer of its own. He shifts his weight in the chair, begins to stand, and Jon says, “Does it scare you, Martin?”

Martin stops. He’s not going to tell Jon that he’s  _sad_. That looking at the life led by the Martin through the glass reminds him how little he has in his own; that he envies it. He’s not. He says, “No…a bit? The mirror and—the things I’ve seen—none of that feels malevolent. I know that doesn’t really mean anything, it could still be evil, if a mirror can be evil, I dunno, but I’m not scared of the  _mirror_. I am afraid of what might happen if it takes me at the wrong time. I know it’s dangerous. I’m not stupid.”

Jon looks almost surprised at him, like he hadn’t considered that as a possibility. Or like he hadn’t considered that Martin might not be scared. Martin supposes that would be fair. He usually is scared, of one thing or another. “That’s a reasonable worry. Be careful.”

“Yes,” Martin says, and then he does stand up. “I guess I’ll go see what I can find out. D’you need anything else?”

“Not at the moment.” Jon slips the mirror back into its drawer. He avoids skin contact as he does so, keeping a plastic glove between himself and the heavy silver the entire time. Martin doesn’t bother to point out that’s not going to make a difference. Jon knows, of course he does. “Don’t let your other work suffer.”

“I won’t.”

Tim and Sasha are at their desks, and murmur hellos to him as he passes. He’s standing beside his own desk, thinking on where best to start, when Tim says, “You look like hell, Martin.”

Martin looks at Tim, face scarred like Jon’s, but not his, because he left them, ran away in the dark and left them. Prentiss should have got to him too. He manages a half-hearted smile. “Thanks. Needed to hear that.”

“You really don’t look well.” Sasha studies him over an open binder. “Are you sure you shouldn’t have stayed home today?”

“I’m fine,” he insists, and at the dubious look she gives him, “I just didn’t get much sleep last night is all. I’ll have a nap over lunch if I can.”

“Try to get some rest,” she says, and her eyes flick back to whatever it is she’s reviewing.

Tim takes a long drink from his mug. “I don’t usually get much sleep either. You should try having a few long nights that are at least fun. It’d brighten you up.”

Martin laughs, and rolls his eyes, and says, “I’m going to go and make tea. Do either of you want anything?”

“Already got my coffee,” Tim says.

“I have one from my favorite café.” Sasha indicates a paper cup. “Thank you.”

Martin excuses himself.

The basement of the Institute is a dreary place. It’s clean, sure, and well-preserved enough, and looks better now than it did prior to Prentiss’s attack, after the deep-clean and bits of reconstruction, but that hasn’t made it any less ominous. The lights don’t flicker, though they seem, always, like they’re waiting for the opportune moment to start. It feels like the sort of place you come to spill your secrets; it feels like the sort of place that intends to swallow them whole down a greedy throat.

Upstairs, The Magnus Institute does little more to look welcoming, but as it’s not a basement, it pulls off refined more than creepy. The building is old, full of varnished wood and polished decor as somber as it is beautiful. Their break room-slash-kitchenette is located just down the hall from the stairwell, which turns hard to continue up, where the library sprawls and Elias keeps his office. The ground floor houses intake, researchers, and Artefact Storage, at the rear of the building.

Martin finds Hannah in the break room, a stocky, cheerful woman, nibbling absently at a piece of toast. The room smells strongly of apples and jam, a distinct reminder that Martin hasn’t eaten yet. “G’morning,” he says.

Hannah brushes a few strands of hair from her face, swallowing the toast. “So,” she says, “how’s life in the dungeon? Already itching to escape, and it’s so early.”

“Oh, it’s…chilly,” Martin says. “A bit musty. I’d suggest lighting a few scented candles, but the whole place might go up in flames at the mention of fire.”

Hannah snorts. “I don’t see how you can stand to work down there. It looked a complete mess the time I saw it.”

That would have been before they took over. The majority of the Institute’s staff avoid the Archive the way Martin avoids Artefact Storage and tight spaces: it’s good for a stop on the tour your first day, and after that it’s an unpleasant memory to pull out and look at when you’re reminding yourself things could always be worse.

Of course, now Martin’s seen  _worse_ , up close and personal. He still prefers the Archive, though he does his best to stay out of old document storage; he’s seen those walls plenty.

He rifles through the cupboard for his favorite mug, his name written across its bottom in neat letters. “It’s not so bad.”

Sometimes it is. But that’s not the point.

“If you say so.” Hannah takes the last bite of her toast and stands, wiping her hands off on a napkin. “Have a good day in your pit, Martin.”

“And you,” he says, “in your room that has actual windows. You’ll have to tell me what that’s like sometime.”

She laughs on her way out.

Once he’s returned to his desk, Martin sifts through his drawers for an empty notebook. The closest he comes is a spiral with several pages of poems in it, followed by nothing. It’ll do. He takes up a pen and sets to writing down what he’s seen, as Jon said. For this, he writes in detail. The smells he remembers. The thoughts, heard through a fog as they are, in a voice that is and is not his own. The people he’s seen. He writes all he can, and when he’s finished, his wrist is screaming at him, but there’s a satisfaction in having it down.

He’s not yet finished with the mirror for the day.

It’s a quick enough search online to locate the Keston charity shop where he found the mirror. Their hours indicate they’re only just opening. He decides to postpone calling them, just for a little while.

For the moment he picks a corner of the Archive and finds a disheveled mountain of statements to sort through. It’s not a surprise that they’re almost completely out of order; whether that order is chronological, alphabetical, numerical by case number, they’re not in it. He does this for a while, and then returns to his desk, glances at his list of information to look into, and dives into investigating missing persons reports in Genoa, Italy. It’s something of a comfort, that he’s able to keep his mind on his work today. Jon already thinks he’s incompetent; the last thing he needs is to be thought even more so, due to the mirror and its distractions.

The mirror does sit in the corner of his mind, of course. It’s taken up residence in the one it likes best, dusted up the floor and made itself at home. The other Martin sits there too, he imagines, in a little armchair, with his laugh and his smile and his books of poetry. Martin owns some of the same. He wonders, absently, while waiting on a report to download, if the poems are identical, or if there are changes, differences in word choice that seem minute but lend their poets a uniqueness and a different weight from those he’s read himself.

But he works around those thoughts until eleven, and then he picks up his desk phone to ring up the charity shop. He counts the rings, twisting the phone’s cord about his fingers.

One. Two. Thre—

A breathless woman’s voice answers, “Holloway’s Giving & Grace, this is Gretchen, what can I do for you?”

“Hi, I was in on Sunday, and I wanted to see if I could learn anything about an item I picked up,” Martin says, and proceeds to explain his purchase, leaving out that the purchase in question has some unusual properties.

“Oh, you’ll be looking for Caitlin,” Gretchen says. “Caitlin Holloway owns this place. If we’ve got a donation record, she’ll have it. Unfortunately she’s away on holiday for the next two weeks, and her system is a bit beyond me. I can take a message, if you like.”

“Please,” Martin says, and leaves her the number for the Institute. He hangs up, doing his best not to be disappointed. Even if the owner were there, he wasn’t expecting the call to be a fruitful one. But it’s like Jon looking at him earlier, expectation versus hope. Martin spends a moment frowning at his phone, his desk, anything within frowning distance, and then clucks his tongue in a determined sort of way.

The day’s young. There’s plenty more he can do.

He makes his way upstairs again, and up another floor yet, where he lets himself into the library. It’s by far the brightest and liveliest place in the Institute, which isn’t to say it’s  _loud_. Its denizens are the sort whose shouts are little above whisper-volume, at least when they’re on their own territory. Martin’s always thought it simultaneously impressive and unnerving, even when he worked up here. He spots Hannah at a desk with Diana, whose strawberry braid appears an inch longer every time he sees her, and makes his way toward them.

Diana gives him her broad, welcoming smile. “Martin. Need help finding something today?”

“I do,” he says. “Do either of you know if we have much about mirrors?”

“Spooky, spooky mirrors. Did you know we’ve got one in Artefact Storage that shows you your worst fears coming true?” Hannah shivers. “Not my favorite thing in this building. Not my favorite thing at all.”

“I’ve never looked in it,” Martin says lightly. He’s more concerned with the one in Jon’s desk. “I’m looking to start general. Maybe go deeper after that, depending on where the rabbit hole leads me.”

“I’m sure we’ve got something.” Several keystrokes later, Diana’s standing up, her braid swishing all the way down to her waist. “Got it. Let’s go and find them, shall we?”

Diana sends him away a little while later with three texts on the history of mirrors in superstition and folklore, mirrors that have been cursed or enchanted, and mirrors that don’t mirror the way they ought. He pages through the first of them at his desk, listening to Tim flirt his way into information and Sasha complain at her computer. Mirrors, according to this author have widely been considered a good conduit for the magical, and therefore used by religious sects and practitioners of magic arts and the superstitious, for a wide variety of purposes. There’s nothing by page twelve about mirrors that show through to alternate realities, which is unfortunate.

That would have really sped things up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It feels weird not having any Cosy!verse scenes in this chapter, but here we are.


	7. everything is fine

A weighty book hits Martin’s desk with a  _thud_. He startles, head ducking lower in anticipation of more incoming projectile hardcovers. When he’s sure(ish) that there aren’t going to be additional arrivals, he raises his eyes to blink at Tim, who’s looking quite pleased with himself.

It was a good throw, Martin admits privately. The book landed on an empty square without scattering the rest of his desk’s contents. He might have cried if it knocked over the collection of statements he’s taken the time to organize. “What was that for?”

“Oh, you haven’t died.” There’s another book in Tim’s hand, seemingly readied for Martin to have stuck in his reverie through the first’s crash landing. “We couldn’t tell and were beginning to place bets.”

Sasha drags a prim fingernail down a page in one of her impeccably ordered binders. “I abstained.”

“Sorry.” Martin scoots forward on his chair. “Did you need something?”

“You’ve been dead quiet all day.” Tim sets his second book aside, evidently having decided that he’s gotten Martin’s attention well enough for the moment. “I wondered if there’s something you’d like to share with the class. What’s got you so enraptured?”

Martin swaps his book out for the one Tim’s lobbed over. It’s a massive, falling apart thing, the spine half-separated from the pages and the title too far gone to read. He turns to the title page. It’s unsurprisingly a guide to London’s oldest structures. “It’s just some reading.”

“Yeah, I see that.” Tim hops out of his chair and moseys around the archival mess to swipe a book from Martin’s little pile. His face goes from curious to bemused in a second. “Mirrors, Martin? Exciting. I can see why you’re so engrossed that you haven’t said a word to either of us in hours.”

Martin checks the clock over Tim’s shoulder. “It’s been one hour, maybe.”

Tim waves this off. “Close enough.”

“It’s quite different,” Sasha says, sealing a sticky note onto her page and gently closing the binder.

“Also,” Martin says, jabbing a finger onto the book, “mirrors can’t possibly be any less interesting than the hundreds of pages you’re always reading to chase down more about Smirke.”

“Ah.” Tim flicks through the book he’s picked up. It’s one Martin hasn’t started in on yet. He’s not the fastest reader. “I’ll have you know architectural history is incredibly intriguing.”

Martin offers him the thrown, pathetic book in exchange for his own. “If that’s what you’ve got to tell yourself.”

Tim rolls his eyes. Across the room, Sasha’s standing up and brushing dust from her skirt. “I’m taking a long lunch today,” she says, pulling her purse from the bottom drawer of her desk. “Try not to burn the Archive down while I’m gone.”

“Oh, I don’t know, burning it down sounds easier than organizing the rest of it.” There’s a twinkle in Tim’s eye, which comes as a bit of a relief. He’s still a good-humored man, but Martin catches him sometimes with something darker on his face, more scars from Prentiss that have dug beneath the surface. Martin doesn’t want to see Tim shatter.

“Not a bad point,” Martin says. His stomach gurgles. He sets a hand there, only then realizing he still hasn’t eaten an actual meal today. “And not a bad idea.” He hastens to add, “A long lunch, I mean, not burning the Archive down.”

Not that he considers  _that_  a horrid idea either.

Martin shoulders his own bag, tucking the book and his spiral notebook inside. He walks as far as the front gate with Sasha before they part ways. The weather has improved since the morning, the sun peeking out from behind the clouds to make everything less grey than it was, the wind gone from the ‘trying to abscond with your belongings’ sort and more the ‘hello, how are you doing?’ variety. He makes his way to a takeaway shop hidden in an alley, the cheapest he knows of around The Magnus Institute, where he picks up a chicken sandwich and chips before carrying on to Kensington Gardens, abuzz with activity even midday on a Tuesday.

He settles down beside a tree to block what’s left of the wind and watches a group of children kick around a football under the close supervision of a parent. The air here is fresh and tastes strongly of recently rained upon grass, but the ground has dried already, and it’s better than the Archive.

The Archive’s still got him, he thinks, taking a bite of his sandwich. Whether he’s there or not. He’s still trapped. He knows that, feels it in his chest. Free men don’t feel asphyxiated at the thought of quitting their jobs. He may not be sleeping in old document storage anymore, but he’s far from free.

Here, sat in the shade of this tree, Martin can pretend otherwise. The world’s still normal, carrying on no matter what’s happening to him and to Jon and to the people whose statements flood the Archive.

Martin takes the book from his bag. He reads while he eats, occasionally taking down a note. There’s not much he thinks is really of use. He writes pieces down anyhow; it helps him to feel as though he’s getting somewhere. His mind drifts as he reads, to other subjects he might look into: the words on the back of the mirror, theories on alternate universes, windows and glass.

A cluster of ducks waddles by him. Martin tosses several chips in their general direction, smiling as they descend upon the offering. “There you go,” he says. Two of them give him a hopeful look. He tosses another handful. It can’t be good for them, but they seem well pleased with him. They wander off when it becomes clear he’s not throwing out anything more. He watches them go with a forcibly cheerful, “Have a good day, you lot.”

His day, well—that’s going as well as can be expected, isn’t it? The last really good one was ages ago. His eyes return to the pages, where the words are swimming, and do not stop when he blinks. He blinks again and there are no more words for him to read.

* * *

 

“Right, so that was a mint tea, a hazelnut latte, a frozen hot chocolate, and three of the ham and swiss. Was that all?”

Martin, edging his way out of the kitchen with a full tray balanced dangerously on his hip, glances over at Georgie. She’s taken on the till for the last hour. He might even say she’s done so with gusto, if that were the sort of thing people really said. With relish, maybe. No, that’s not any better. She’s been  _eager_. He’s helped her with order fulfillment until now, but the lunch rush has dwindled to its end, leaving only two people in line, and Martin has snatched at the opportunity to restock the case, as it’s gone barren. Besides, he’s right here if she does need him.

He doesn’t listen for the customer’s response. His attentions turn to emptying the tray into the case. It’ll likely as not be empty again before they leave for the evening.

It’s been a busy day, but they all are.

The morning rush hadn’t left him a chance to talk to Jon about last night, much as he’d wanted to. He’d done his best not to frown when watching him leave, but Michael had helpfully tapped him on the shoulder and informed him that he looked as though someone had compared his best recipes to Maxwell House instant and maybe he ought to smile for the customers. On the positive side of things, Michael also hasn’t had opportunity to corner him about the subject a second time.

At least they’ve got Georgie now. It had felt like a blessing this morning, when she asked if she might have an interview, and have it today. It felt like another when he hired her right on, and another still when he asked, “When are you available to start?” and she’d said, “Now, if you like.”

She’s taken to the work astonishingly well—she’s a quick learner, cheerful and animated with the customers, and she’s got an excellent mind for details. She hadn’t missed a beat when, fifteen minutes into her first crack at the till, a scowling businessman ordered a sandwich with half its ordinary toppings replaced by different ones. (Martin had fixed the sandwich himself, but she’d given him the list readily enough off the top of her head.) Nor had she flinched when a twitchy university student ordered an iced vanilla sweet cream including pumps of vanilla, as well as caramel, cinnamon dolce, hazelnut, maple pecan, and toffee nut syrups, not to mention the mocha, white mocha, pumpkin sauce, and shots of espresso. Martin’s teeth threatened a dentist’s visit from the mere thought of its sugar contents when she parroted it back to him for making. Georgie’d only shrugged afterward, and said it was no worse than some of the drinks she’d tried in uni.

“But that’s so excessive,” Martin had said in a pleading sort of way.

“Yeah, I know that now, more refined palate and all.” She’d winked. “At the time I was mostly trying to stay awake.”

The point is, he may have to chide Jon and Gerry for not bringing her to him sooner. Sure, she’s still getting the hang of the register itself, but it’s a fussy machine, theirs, and memorizing some of the food and drink will take time. As she’s been employed at Cosy for approximately three hours, Martin expects her to be a pro before the week is out.

He stands, his back offering the protests of a much older man, and stops beside her at one of the blenders. “You’re all right up here?”

“Sure.” The look she gives the blender says it ought to capitulate to her demands in an immediate sense, or else. “I’ve gotten through the line. I think we might even have five spare minutes when I’m done here.”

“You’re tempting fate,” Martin says, and carries the now emptied tray into the kitchen.

Michael’s stood at one of the sinks, scrubbing his hands. Without looking up, he says, “Is Georgie doing okay?”

“Georgie is doing more than all right,” Martin says, “though I do worry she’s going to make all of our machines swear fealty to her above all others.”

Michael laughs. He shuts the water off and dries his hands. “Anything we’re in dire need of?”

“Not at the moment. I’m popping into the office, you keep on doing what you’re doing. Maybe check on Georgie if I’m more than five minutes.”

As it happens, he takes ten. His desk, systemically organized as it is, does have a tendency to steal things, like it thinks he may not notice that his scissors have gone missing for a sixth time. In the end he prints a new copy of what he needs, fully expecting the old one to pop up as soon as he has.

When he returns to the front of the café there are no customers in line, and Georgie’s watching the door like a hawk. Martin slides a thin stack of paper onto the counter in front of her. “That’s the bulk of what we keep on the menu at all times,” he says, and then somewhat apologetically, “We haven’t got anything more professional.”

“This’ll do for me,” she says, absently touching her hair.

“That’ll be our last real busy spell for the day,” Martin tells her. “We’re pretty on and off until closing, usually.” Lacking anywhere to sit back here, as there’s not often the time to do so, he leans on the wall.

They spend several minutes in companionable quiet, Georgie absorbing herself in her new guide. Eventually, Martin clears his throat. “You said this morning that you wanted to see what the fuss was. Jon and Gerry talk about the place a lot then?”

It’s pride in his business. For the most part, it is. He can’t deny the rush of pleasure at the thought of Jon talking about him outside of his own premises; but he and his café aren’t a single entity. It’s Cosy that Jon talks about, or that Gerry talks about. Word of mouth is great advertising, no matter who’s recommending his place. That’s it.

He knows, of course, that that’s not it, but it’s easier not to think about what else it is.

“They are here every day,” Georgie says, rubbing a page corner between her fingers. “I definitely get it now. And I’ll also be here every day. Earlier than them.” She makes a face. “The things I do.”

“I’m sorry I’ve asked you to come in so ungodly early,” Martin says.

“Nothing to apologize for. I knew the risks when I asked for the job.”

“I’m still looking to hire more help,” he tells her. “I’m not actually trying to run us all ragged.”

“I think you could do with another three or four for the busy hours. Especially as this seems to be the first  _not_  busy hour. I dunno how you and Michael were doing it on your own.” Georgie leans forward, her elbows on the counter like the guide is an exam she’s got to hide from her neighbors. “Did you come up with all of this on your own?”

“The drinks are my area.” On that note, his throat’s not at its best. He moves to fix himself a cup of tea. Mint sounds nice. “The baking is all Michael. Everything else was a combined effort.”

“Ah,” she says.

“I didn’t ask during your interview—what made you decide to ask for a job? You’d only been in here the once.”

“Oh, you know.” Georgie waves a hand at her surroundings. She makes a sound that’s on its way to a laugh. “The fuss. I’m working on several podcast projects and writing a few things, and Gerry doesn’t actually make us pay to live in his house, so money’s not much of an issue, but I’ve been needing more to do.”

“You live with them, then?”

From this angle, he sees the smile creeping up her face. “Yeah.”

“How long have you known them?”

“Not at long as they’ve known each other,” she says. “They’ve been close since primary school. I met Jon our first year in uni. We bonded over complaints about a classmate we thought was a pretentious prat. Then he introduced me to Gerry, and  _we_  bonded over conversation about Jon being a pretentious prat. I say that with all the love in the world, mind.”

Michael arrives with a tray just as Martin’s filling three cups with mint tea.

“Speaking of Jon,” Georgie says, and only now does she fully look up from the guide. “He hasn’t been the most forthcoming about last night, but I know he was here.”

“What makes you think I’m going to tell you more than he did?” Martin passes her a cup, which she raises to him before taking a drink.

“Martin hasn’t told _me_ anything about it either,” Michael says, laced through with disappointment.

“I’ll give you his number if you tell me,” Georgie says sweetly.

Michael sets the tray atop the display with a look of great interest.

“That’s a nice offer,” Martin says mildly. “But no, thank you. I can get that myself if I want it.”

“So you’re not seeing anybody then?” Georgie peers at the tray, where there are sandwiches and salads. “I hope one of those is for me.”

Michael laughs, and turns it into a cough at the look Martin gives him. He sets one plate in front of Georgie and hands another to Martin, keeping the last for himself. “Martin hasn’t been on a date in about a year.”

“I have been a little busy starting a business,” Martin says. “It hasn’t been a small amount of work.”

“Yeah,” Michael says, “and now you have a business that’s excelling, so what’s your excuse?”

“I have a business that’s excelling and I’m still incredibly busy,” Martin points out, gesturing to the café around them. “Also, I’m not going to make Jon uncomfortable by asking him out. Goes somewhat against what I’ve named the place.”

“I don’t think that’s the effect it would have.” Michael nibbles on the corner of his sandwich.

“It’s not,” Georgie seconds. “He’s gone all moony over you, Martin. Not that he’d admit it.”

Martin busies himself with his meal, avoiding looking at either of them. Feeling their eyes is plenty. He says, “I’ll ask Jon out when you ask Tim for his number, Michael.”

“Tim,” Georgie says, and Martin feels her eyes snap away from him. She sounds utterly delighted. He dares to look up and finds Michael’s cheeks have colored. “That was the sort of ruggedly handsome one who wanted us to hurry it up this morning, right? Do you like him, Michael?”

“Oh,” Michael says, sounding for his part like he wants to run away. “No, that’s not—”

* * *

 

Martin’s book has fallen into his lap. The press of it is the first thing he feels as he comes back to himself, before he hears the pages rustling where the wind has taken hold to do some reading. The children and their football have gone.

None of this comes as a surprise.

Martin digs into his pocket for his phone. What  _is_  a surprise is that, according to the time flashing up at him, he’s not late getting back to the Institute. It hasn’t been long at all.

“Right,” he says, and gropes about the grass for his pen, which has rolled away. He pushes too hard as he writes, nearly tearing through the paper. There was more oddness about the time, he notes. It looked to be around the same time for the other Martin as it is for himself. Martin and Michael and Georgie. He takes down their words, what he clearly remembers of them. When he’s finished, he stands to dispose of his rubbish.

It must be nice, he thinks dully, the world having gone greyer again through no fault of the sky, to have a friend half as good as Michael. It must be nice to have anyone at all; he hasn’t, and isn’t sure he ever really has. But that’s not true. He  _is_  sure.

“Have a good lunch?” Tim asks when he drops back into his chair.

Martin lies easily enough. It’s the sort of lie he’s used to telling—

Everything is fine.

* * *

Jon spends the majority of his day doing his job. His thoughts do occasionally attempt to dart toward Gertrude or the mirror or Martin, but he herds them back into order with little more than a stern ‘not now.’ In the last case, a sterner ‘not at all.’

It’s three o’clock when Martin raps at his door; he recognizes the sound, has heard it often enough since returning to work. He watches the door swing open over the statement he’s been reviewing and intends to record soon, given by one Jennifer Ling. Martin steps in, balancing a tea tray on one hand. Jon’s thoughts dart, and he shoves them back into place.

“I thought you might like a drink,” Martin says by way of both greeting and explanation, neither of which are entirely necessary. It also sounds like a question.

Jon gives him a nod. “Thank you.”

He takes Martin in as he crosses the room. There’s little difference from this morning; he looks stressed, certainly, but he already had. Still. Something about him strikes Jon as off-balance. It’s in his face. He waits until Martin is at his desk, setting a cup of tea in front of him, to say, “Has it happened again?”

Martin stills like a prey animal caught in its predator’s line of sight. Jon resists a wan smile at the thought. Martin looks unsure what he’d like to be doing with his hands, and settles for squeezing them around the edges of the tray. “Yes,” he says, hardly audible. “I wrote it down. Were you still going to…”

The question trails without quite ending. Jon’s eyes flick toward his bottom drawer. He runs an irritated hand through his hair. “Yes,” he says. “I planned to leave shortly. I’ve found a place to store it.”

“Right,” Martin says. He stretches the word’s end. “Right. Good. That’s good. I’ll just leave you to that. Let me know if you need me. I’ll be, you know.” He waves a hand in the general direction of the Archive. “Lots to do.”

Then he’s heading for the door. Jon watches his departing back and says, before he’s gone from the room, “Don’t let it take you over, Martin. It’s only a mirror.”

Martin’s laugh is quick and weak. “I know. I told you I’m not afraid.”

Jon knows there’s an irony to what he’s said.  _Don’t let it take you over._  As though he hasn’t let Gertrude’s murder do precisely that. He drinks his tea slowly, putting off the mirror for as long as he possibly can. Only when he’s drained every drop from his cup does he rifle about for a box to stow it in. He’s careful as ever not to make contact while transferring it to its new container.

He says a quick farewell to his assistants on his way out, ignoring the surprise on Tim and Sasha’s faces.

What he can’t ignore is Elias coming down the steps before he’s made it through the Institute’s front door and calling, “Jon. Where are you off to so early?”

 _Jon,_  he hears echoed in a voice that’s just the same,  _I’m surprised to see you leaving the building this early in the day._

Messy desks and being managed by Elias Bouchard. That’s what they’ve got in common, him and the wrong Jon. Hardly conscious of doing so, Jon pulls his bag tight against himself as Elias comes closer. “I’m not feeling my best today. I thought I would go home early.”

“Did you?” The surprise there sounds genuine enough. The pleasure as well, the smile curving Elias’ mouth and following right up on through his eyes. He doesn’t look at Jon’s bag for even a second. It’s fine. “Good. I’m glad to hear you’re taking care of yourself.”

“Everyone’s so surprised when I do,” Jon says dryly. They have  _that_  in common as well, don’t they. “I do have the capability.”

“Yes, but I’m not sure you always remember that you do,” Elias says. He touches Jon’s shoulder, his hand squeezing before he lets go. “Go home and rest. If you’d like to have tomorrow off as well, you’re welcome to it. I prefer my Head Archivist to be in top shape.”

“That won’t be necessary.” Jon takes a step toward the door. “I’ll be here bright and early.”

Elias shakes his head in a way Jon would almost call fond, if he thought fondness were something Elias felt toward anybody. It’s certainly not a thing to be directed at him. “You’re free to change your mind.”

“I won’t,” Jon says, and then, somewhat awkwardly, “I’ll see you tomorrow, Elias.”

“Or the day after, Jon,” Elias says, and moves on to speak to Rosie.

The walk to the station is uneventful. Jon keeps his thoughts focused strictly on his destination: Enfield Town Station, followed by a walk to the Sovereign Safe Deposit Box Centre, and then back home to his flat.

It’s not until he’s seated on the train that he allows himself to think of the mirror again. What is it that causes them to see through it? (If ‘seeing through it’ is quite the right way to think of it, given they don’t need to be looking at its glass at all.) Martin was correct in noting that it can’t just be thinking about it; it would be more of a constant, in that case. But it isn’t. Jon frowns at the floor of the train car. There’s got to be  _something_ that triggers it. It can’t be random. He nearly snorts at himself.

It can’t be random. Why the hell couldn’t it be? It’s a supernatural mirror. It hasn’t got to follow rules.

Jon rubs at his eyes. When he opens them again, the train car has gone, replaced by low light and a disorderly desk and the strong smell of ancient books. He might curse, if he were aware of his own mouth.

* * *

_Done._

Jon slaps his pen onto his desk and shoves the last of the remaining Shakespeare essays—every last one of them now marked within an inch of their lives in bright red ink—into a folder for ease of avoiding eye contact until he hands them back tomorrow. His students won’t be pleased. But if they wanted to be pleased, they ought to have written halfway decent papers. There are certain academic standards at work here, foundational course or not. It’s his responsibility, much as he may resent it, to prepare them for the rest of their university experience. He’s not going to do so by being merciful.

Not that he’d choose mercy in any case.

For several minutes, Jon weighs the merits of remaining here a while longer and digging into his research anew. It’s only half seven. There’s plenty of time left in the evening. But Gerry and Georgie will both lecture him if he comes home late again. But—and this is the part that compels him to pack up his bag and exit his closet into the dimly lit hall—he thinks Martin would frown at him for staying and exhausting himself.

He’s made it nearly off campus when his phone starts to buzz. The photo that comes up is Georgie, grinning at him on the beach, her hair and skin a mess of sand. It had taken weeks to fully vacuum it all out of the house afterward. He answers with, “I’m already out of the office, no need to say anything.”

“That’s good to hear and now I’m not sure you’re the real Jon,” she chirps, “but it’s not what I’m calling for.”

“What is it then?”

“I’m about finished at Cosy,” she says, a note in her voice he doesn’t trust at all. It’s quite possible, likely even, that he doesn’t trust any notes she might have at present. “Come and pick me up. I’d rather not walk home alone.”

“So call Gerry,” he says, and before she can protest, “I’ll be there soon.”

“I’ll tell Martin you’re coming,” Georgie says sweetly, and hangs up on him before he can so much as yelp at her. He stuffs his phone back into his pocket.  _She wouldn’t._  It was a joke, before, her possibly offering him to Martin for marriage. But it is Georgie. There’s no guarantee.

He types a message to Gerry.  _We’ve got to find a new café._

 _We’re not doing that,_  arrives just as he reaches Cosy.

There’s a single customer remaining, seated at a table near the front, engaged in conversation with Georgie, who’s nearer to the door. And there’s Martin behind the counter, busying himself with one of the machines. Jon stands in place a moment. Watching. Then Martin turns from the machine and spots him, and waves, and he’s got to go in.

“Jon!” Georgie says, and he cannot tell if he ought to be suspicious of her or not. Almost certainly.

“Are you ready to go?” Jon asks.

“Just about.”

“Hello, Jon.” Martin’s voice is mild. It gives away even less than Georgie’s. Jon just looks at him, drinking in the smile aimed in his direction and reminding himself that Martin smiles at several hundred customers the same way every day. It’s not a thing unique to him. But there’s a certain quirk to Martin’s mouth that he doesn’t recall seeing directed at Gerry, or that man Tim, or—oh, lord, Georgie’s done it, hasn’t she? She’s told him Jon’s got a crush, or she’s done worse, and now Martin thinks he’s an idiot and  _that’s_  why he’s smiling like that.

Georgie passes by close enough to nudge him, carrying dishes, and clears her throat as she goes. He realizes then that he hasn’t said a word in the time it’s taken the other customer to depart, and says, “Hello.”

 _Oh, well done._  He may as well turn around and leave now, if this is any sign of how well he’ll be functioning around Martin from here on out. Gerry can keep to Cosy; Jon will return to the less interesting Starbucks several streets away.

Martin’s mouth moves in a way that suggests he’s repressing a laugh. The effort is good of him. Jon’s sure he deserves to be laughed at about now. “Had a nice day?”

“It’s been all right. I’ve finished with the papers I was telling you about.”

“Yeah? Did they get any better as you went on?”

Jon shakes his head. “Dreadful to the last.”

“Good thing you’ve finished with them, then.”

“Yes,” Jon says intelligently.

“I’m going to fetch my purse,” Georgie announces. She waits until she’s behind Martin, just at the door to the back of the café, to give Jon a pointed look that slides to Martin and back; he pretends he hasn’t noticed.

He doesn’t say a word as Martin comes out from behind the counter. Martin’s all the way to the door, locking up to prevent any latecomers, when he says, “Martin?”

Martin looks directly at him. “Yes, Jon?” There’s something there that Jon wishes he could read. If Martin were written onto a page, if he came complete with dialogue tags and a close viewpoint, if he were an easier thing to read. But Martin is a man, not a book, and Jon is—well.

“How was Georgie today?”

It’s not disappointment that passes over Martin’s face, he’s sure. Martin shakes his head and says, “She was magnificent. I wish you’d brought her to me a month ago.”

Georgie sweeps back through the door, now with Michael in tow and her keychain collection jangling its presence known. “Hear that, Jon? I’m great at this job.”

“I didn’t doubt you for a second,” he says.

She ignores him and turns to Michael. “Are you sure you don’t need anything else before I go? I don’t mind staying, and it’s not as though Jon has anything better to do with his time.”

“Do call Gerry the next time you need somebody to walk you home.” Georgie doesn’t acknowledge him, but he does get a chuckle from Martin.

“You’re free to go,” Michael says.

“We’ll have you stay tomorrow evening,” Martin tells her, still standing beside the door. “You’ve done enough for today.”

“D’you think you’re ready for the morning rush?” Michael asks.

“The better question,” Georgie says, “would be is the morning rush ready for me?”

“Is anybody?” Jon says.

Georgie grins at him. “Nope.” She crosses the café to stand beside Jon and says, “I’ll see you two in the morning.”

“See you then,” Michael says, and gives Jon a nod before ducking into the back again.

“Good night, Georgie,” Martin says, unlocking the door again for them, and then, “See you in the morning, Jon.”

Jon forces himself to nod. “In the morning.”

Georgie drags him through the door before he can make a bigger fool of himself. It’s a warm evening, windless and dry.

They make it as far as the next corner before Georgie says, “Aren’t you going to ask me how my first day was?”

“I’m really not sure I want to,” Jon says. “You’ll tell me whether or not I want to hear it.”

“Some friend you are,” she says, playfully knocking his shoulder with hers. The keychains practically go on the offensive.

He heaves an exaggerated sigh. “How was your first day of work, Georgie?”

“Busy, Jon. It was busy.” She slips her arm into his as they approach a group of men around their own age. “Martin is incredibly successful and you should be so lucky as to have him support your destitute professor lifestyle.”

“Unbelievable.” The scoff isn’t entirely faked. “This is why I didn’t want to ask, the very first thing you do—”

She interrupts him with a laugh. “Actually, it’s a fun job. Martin and Michael are both very sweet, and while the customers do sometimes need a choice kick, Martin is the most calming person I’ve ever met. He’s like one of those recordings meant to soothe you to sleep.”

“He is good at that,” Jon says, and lets her go on at length about her day. She keeps up through their train ride back to Chelsea, and much of the walk home.

Eventually though—of course it was too good to last—she says, “D’you know, you were really awfully  _super_  smooth back there, the way you greeted Martin. We should all aspire to be like you around people we’re attracted to.”

“Oh, shut up,” he says, scowling more at his own lack of witty retort than at Georgie.

“Shall I tell him you like him,” she asks, “or are you going to do it yourself?”

“You haven’t already promised me to him then?”

“You’ve got such a paltry dowry,” she says, and he snorts, “that I thought it best to wait until you’ve seduced him a bit.”

“I’m not actually planning to ask him out,” Jon says.

“Jonathan Sims,” Georgie says.

He makes his voice as steely as he can (very, given the students he’s dealt with throughout the years). “Georgina Barker.”

“I honestly don’t see why.” There’s frustration there now, clear as anything. Georgie he understands quite well. No dialogue tags necessary. “Yes, I said before that you were an awful boyfriend, but Jon, I didn’t mean you’re a horrid hobgoblin who should never date again and  _you like him_!”

Leaving aside that it doesn’t matter who he likes, as most people don’t like  _him_ , Jon says, “I’m busy with my dissertation. I haven’t got the time to date anybody.” The answering laugh is disbelieving. “What? You know I’m—”

“What I know is that you’re going to work yourself to the bone if Gerry and I don’t stop you,” she says. “But I’m laughing because that’s the second time today I’ve heard someone claim they’re too busy to go on a date.”

Jon pins her with a look. “What did you do, Georgie?”

“Nothing! I wanted to, you’re both hopeless, but honestly, I haven’t done anything.” They’re to their front door now, Jon letting Georgie go first. “You’ve been busy forever, and we all know you’re going to be busy forever as you’ve always got to give yourself too much to do. Let yourself enjoy life for ten minutes. Kiss a cute boy!”

“Yeah,” Gerry says from the living room, which he’s once again turned into a studio, as though he hasn’t got a dedicated room in the attic. “Kiss a cute boy, Jon.”

“I didn’t ask you,” Jon says.

“Come here and I’ll kiss you myself.” Gerry winks at him. Jon rolls his eyes. They’d kissed once, when they were fifteen, and immediately concluded that while boys certainly appealed, they were  _not_  the right boys for each other. Not romantically, in any case. “Dinner’s on the stove. I made stew.”

Georgie beats him to the kitchen and has a bowl out for him before he’s gotten there. Gerry ambles in after them, paintbrush still in hand and dripping on the floor. It’s his floor to drip on, so neither Jon nor Georgie comment.

“The thing is,” Georgie says, shoveling stew into a dish, “you’re going to be impossible to live with now. You’re  _painfully_  awkward to live with when you’re attracted to somebody. Speaking from experience on all sides here.”

Jon fetches the dinner rolls from the pantry. “I can move out, if you like.”

“Sure,” Gerry says. “Or, Jonny, you could try the easier option for once in all our lives.”

Jon says nothing to this. He imagines Martin smiling at him.

Then Georgie cuts in with, “Martin hasn’t been on a date in a year and I’ll have you know that I even refrained from telling him it’s been much, much longer than that for you,” and he instead imagines chucking a roll at her face.

* * *

The woman across from Jon is staring at him when he comes back to himself, her face going sourer by the second. Jon looks away quickly. He hopes he hasn’t been staring. He probably has been, though it’s not really staring when he hasn’t been seeing anything in front of him. Somehow he doesn’t think the woman will accept an explanation involving damnable supernatural mirrors.

He watches the doors until the train arrives to his stop.

It’s a quick enough walk to the safe deposit location he discovered with a cursory search online. The man behind the counter doesn’t ask him many questions. The information is general, and he is truthful about all of it, because there’s nothing to hide here. Well. Nothing to hide about himself. Only from himself. From any prying eyes in the Institute.

It happens so quickly and with such ease that walking away feels odd. He’s free of the mirror, at least in a physical sense; he imagines he can still feel it in his head, latched onto a piece of his brain. But that’s just his imagination snickering at him. For a moment as he makes his way back to the station, he wonders what it would be like if that life, the wrong Jon’s life, were his own. If a  _knock knock_  hadn’t set him on this path. But  _this_  is his path in life, dark and unpleasant and maddening as it may be.

He wouldn’t be Jonathan Sims if that were his life. He would be  _a_  Jonathan Sims. But not his own. Not himself. It’s not a thing he cares to trade. He wonders what it says about him, that he has no inclination to exchange his life of monsters and horror for one of peaceful academia and normalcy.

When he arrives home, he falls immediately asleep. It’s blessedly dreamless.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> me: this chapter will be 4000 words  
> chapter: actually


	8. in the threshold

It goes on like this for several days.

Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, shuts himself away in his office and interacts with his assistants no more than professionally necessary. He ignores the way Martin looks at him; and he ignores how often Martin looks at him, but he’d been doing that before any of this began. He ignores, as well, the flitting thoughts that he’d like to see Martin smile or hear him laugh, the way he nearly wants to look at Martin.

Those thoughts don’t belong to him.

In another world, another Jonathan Sims attempts to shut himself away in his office and is thwarted by one Georgina Barker and Gerard Keay, who keep his locked away hours to the limited side. He visits a peaceful café called Cosy, and he smiles at a Martin Blackwood with a scar on his face; and Martin Blackwood smiles back at him, and he is effulgent and brilliant with it, and the hearts of both Jonathan Sims flutter.

Jon thinks venomous thoughts toward the mirror, toward the wrong Jon, toward both Martin Blackwoods—and reaches for his notebook once or twice or three times each day.

Martin Blackwood, Archival Assistant, brings Jon tea as often as he’s allowed into the office and ignores the teasing of Timothy Stoker, the suggestive eyebrow waggling and the winks and the incredibly unsubtle thumbs-ups shot at him behind Jon’s back. He does his work, endless phone calls and wades waist-deep into police reports gristlier than he likes, and skips lunch twice out of a stomach-twisting unease; he does another layer of work atop that, throwing himself with a near-frenzied vigor into his attempts to understand what is happening to them, how the mirror is playing with their lives and if there’s a possible way for them to end its game. He reads with a new intent. He thinks, once, that maybe he doesn’t want it to end; but that’s ridiculous, he does, of course he does. He sleeps fitfully, and often with a book clutched to his chest, like he might absorb its contents through his nightmares.

In another world, another Martin Blackwood bustles about his café with a welcoming smile on his face and writes poems in his head, transferring them to paper when there’s time for it. He is pulled aside by a man called Gerry Keay, who tells him, very seriously, “She’s a real handful, Martin, don’t let her stampede around here,” and he laughs without shadows over his face; Gerry Keay thinks for a moment and adds, serious as before, “Jon’s a handful too, but he’s more likely to, hm, burrow and then you’ve got to pull him out,” and Martin busies himself with fixing a drink. He spends his days fending off pestering questions from friends the Archival Assistant cannot imagine having, and he smiles at a Jonathan Sims without any grey in his hair.

Martin feels sorry for himself. This is nothing new. He wants very much to kiss Jonathan Sims, the one who often feels farther away from him than the one through the mirror. There’s nothing new about that either.

Across London, safe and sleepy in a dark box, another consciousness is only dimly aware of any of this. But dimly is more than aware enough to show what there is to be shown.

* * *

It’s nearing eleven o’clock, and Jon is the only person left in the Archive for the evening. He’s probably the only person left in the Institute, but hasn’t gone upstairs to check. It makes no difference. Nobody outside of his staff voluntarily comes downstairs. Elias, occasionally. But for all intents and purposes, Jon feels amply alone.

His investigations, such as they are, are—not all that they could be. Not investigations into the mirror; he’s left  _that_  to Martin thus far and is happy enough (though happy is not the most suitable word) to let it carry on that way. The mirror is a nuisance, and it impresses upon him thoughts that belong to a Jonathan Sims who leads an easier life, and there is no need to allow it to become more than that unless something changes. But it’s not the mirror he’s investigating; it’s not the mirror that has him lurking in the Institute’s shadows long after hours.

That is, invariably, the murder of Gertrude Robinson.

Jon’s no kind of detective. He hasn’t got access to the resources that might put him on the path to understanding what happened to her, why it happened in the deepest, unmarked recesses of The Magnus Institute, who did it to her; neither has he got Tim’s ability to flirt his way to information he ought not have, nor a willingness to ask Tim to make his queries for him. He doesn’t know how to stop it from happening to him next. Gertrude Robinson was an elderly woman. For whatever reason, somebody chose to put bullets through her rather than wait for nature to take its course. Gertrude Robinson was the Institute’s Head Archivist, and that is a role Jon has stepped into, and he thinks that means something, and it is possible—Jon has a sudden, visceral image of his own body slumped in that chair to go cold. He has an image of Martin finding him. He has an image of the gun in Martin’s hand.

At least these images are grounded in his own world. They’re his own. Useless fearmongering of his own making. But—

There’s been no word from the police. Or, if there has, Elias hasn’t deigned to share the information with Jon, who’s tried to seem less than rabid in asking after it. (He’s not sure he’s succeeded.) Elias would share, wouldn’t he?

If he had anything to do with it he would keep Jon in the dark and share nothing. If that were the case—should he break into Elias’ office? Jon leans back in his chair.

If only he’d been able to snag even  _one_  of the tapes they found with Gertrude, then he could—

“Then you could what, Jon?” he mutters to himself. The Archive was in chaos when Jon and his team took over its caretaking. There’s nothing to say those tapes meant anything of significance. It wouldn’t make sense to sit in the tunnels with valuable tapes. It wouldn’t make sense to leave the Archive in the conditions she cultivated over her decades-long tenure. There is nothing, among the admittedly little he knows of Gertrude, that does make sense.

He walks into the Archive itself. It’s still chaos, though it has gotten better under his team’s care. There’s a touch of satisfaction in him at that. It may take them another five years or more to truly wrestle it into submission, but they’ll get there. Assuming, of course, none of them are conspiring to shoot him.

A shape steps through the doorway and Jon instinctively takes a step back. The shape devises itself into a familiar face. Elias. He has a briefcase in hand. His suit is as immaculate as it was this morning. “Jon.”

Jon stares at him, his heart thundering the hardest it has since a voice demanded he vacate the tunnels. “You startled me. I didn’t think anyone was still here.”

“It’s late, Jon.” Elias is inscrutable. There’s a certain peculiar impassiveness to him most times. In the past, Jon hasn’t found it worrisome. In the past. “Very late.”

The last he says more pointedly.

“I know that.” It comes out defensive, though he’s every right to be here. What is  _Elias_  still doing here? More importantly, why is he  _here_? Jon’s mind rewinds through the last few days. He has seen an inordinate amount of the Institute’s Head as of late. It’s possible, even likely, that Elias is concerned for him. It’s the most sensible explanation. He tells himself to accept it, if only for the moment.

“You should go home,” Elias says.

Jon shakes his head. “I have something to wrap up.”

“And whatever it is can’t wait until a more reasonable hour?” Elias nearly smiles. “You might consider three in the morning.”

A chill runs along his spine. It’s a joke. Of course it’s a joke. The Institute was always long dark and empty when he took his trips into the tunnels. Elias cannot possibly know what he was doing. Jon forces himself to laugh. Because it’s a joke.

“You should go home, Jon,” Elias says again, his tone gently stern, like a parent scolding a child for tackling an adventure too dangerous. “Are you feeling well? You can’t be getting enough sleep, the hours you keep, and you are still recovering—”

“I’m fine,” Jon says. “You don’t have to worry over me.”

“You do make that difficult.”

Jon blinks at this, disconcerted into speechlessness. He hadn’t meant—Elias, being worried about anyone, being worried about _him_ —

Elias looks at him still, his mouth going thin. “I’m not going to drag you out of the building, Jon, but I expect you to leave soon.”

“I will,” Jon says, and maybe he will. It depends rather on what happens next.

“Good night then,” Elias says, and then he’s gone.

Jon is, again, alone. He drops his face into a hand, rubbing at his temple. Elias is right. There’s nothing for him here at this hour. He’s hardly prepared—be it practically or mentally—for another sojourn into the tunnels. He’s stayed this late. It feels a waste to leave without doing something, however.

This is how Jon comes to approach the old document storage room. Martin hasn’t lived there in some time. There won’t be anything, but it cannot hurt to check, and then he’ll feel he’s accomplished something. And then he can make his way home to his bed.

He lingers in the threshold, looking over the thin, battered mattress with the sorriest looking pillow the world has ever known, and the mess of shelves. This part of the Archive they’ve hardly begun to touch since taking over for Gertrude, coming into the room only when they’re certain that whatever they’re looking for is inside—which is rarely, as it’s hard to be certain of  _anything’s_  location. More often they settle for reasonably certain.

There’s a stab of guilt in his chest, a tiny piercing needle of it. Martin spent months living here, more terrified than the rest of them, and for longer. But that was about Prentiss, long after Gertrude’s death. One has nothing to do with the other. He cannot trust any of them, and that includes Martin. No matter the business of the mirror, no matter it makes him  _want_  to trust him. It’s not so easy as all that. The nudges of trust belong to the wrong Jon, not to him.

He takes a step forward, and stops. Old document storage is still there, but blurrier than it was. It’s not exhaustion playing at his eyesight. He only manages to take a step back. It makes no difference.

* * *

“I’m making lasagna,” Gerry says.

Jon nearly drops his phone. It’s not due to the lasagna—he hasn’t been overcome by Gerry’s dinner announcement—but part of a mad scramble to catch his folders, which have decided the time has come to make a dash for freedom. Insofar as the floor is freedom. They’d still be stuck in this office, same as he is. He snatches one at an awkward angle, half its contents sliding out, and the others in his arm, where they crinkle their unhappiness. “Not today, you little bastards,” he says.

“Jon,” Gerry says, something simultaneously orchestral and growling in his background, “I don’t know what my lasagna’s done to upset you, but there’s no call to be rude.”

“I’m not talking about the lasagna.” The phone is just barely holding on between his shoulder and his ear. He eases the folders onto his desk, wincing when additional sheets slide out of several, and corrects the phone.

“You’re going to be home to eat it, aren’t you?” It’s not the most subtle probe, but Gerry’s never are. (Nor are Georgie’s. He hasn’t got friends to whom the word subtle means anything, until the time comes to purchase Christmas or birthday gifts. It’s maddening.)

“I shouldn’t be late.” Jon leans down to gather up his work. He flips them over one at a time, sorting them appropriately for returning to their folders.  _The Twelve Dancing Princesses. East of the Sun and West of the Moon. Vasilisa the Fair._ “I’ve got my meeting with Dr. Bouchard in—” a glance at the clock “—ten minutes. I plan to be home after that, mother.”

“Oh, good,” Gerry says, and something _pops_ ; Jon decides he’s better off not asking what that was. It’s Gerry’s house, and he can pop whatever he likes. “Tell him hello from me, will you.”

“Good idea,” Jon says. “I do want him in a poor mood.”

Poorer than he’s going to be anyhow. Jon puts that aside. He’ll deal with it later. In approximately ten minutes.

Gerry snickers. “Go on, give him my love.”

“You’re an idiot,” Jon says, “and I’ll see you at home.”

Then it’s down to looking over this week’s remarkably unremarkable progress and determining what to take with him. In the end he takes little: a single binder, a recently extracted photocopy of an article that is exactly ten sentences long and lacking in a head- or byline, and a half-full spiral notebook. It will have to be enough, though it isn’t, not by half.

There’s an undergraduate student whose name Jon always means to remember, but never does, tending to the front desk in the English office. She glances up from her homework and immediately down again, hardly bothering to lift a directorial hand as she says, “You know where to go,” and well he does.

Jon has been to Dr. Elias Bouchard’s office far too many times to keep count since beginning university. His office is nestled into a corner, has a lovely view, and is several times the size of Jon’s; the desk, in fact, wouldn’t begin to fit inside of Jon’s measly space. It’s well-lit and the overfull bookcase ranges from classical fiction to modern poetry to literary theory, as Dr. Bouchard makes it a point to read widely. There’s a reason Jon was so eager to study under him, and has remained enthusiastic about doing so. He’s also shockingly young for his position and expertise. His eyes are on his computer when Jon arrives, but come away immediately at the clearing of his throat. He smiles, and for a second Jon’s dread subsides.

It returns in full force, of course, when he remembers how little he’s come bearing. Dr. Bouchard’s not going to be impressed.

“Come in,” Dr. Bouchard says with a wave at the same chair Jon’s been sitting in for years. It’s an attractive, well-made thing, if not especially comfortable. “How has your week been, Jon?”

“It’s fine,” Jon says. He sets his things on the desk, leaving one hand on top of them, feeling protective for reasons he cannot articulate; it’s not  _good_  work, but perhaps that in itself is a reason for it. “It’s busy, but that’s no different from usual.”

 _You’ve been busy forever,_  Georgie says in his head,  _and you’re going to be busy forever!_

“You might consider scheduling five minutes off,” Dr. Bouchard says, and glances at his computer screen again. He’s got it turned so that Jon can see what’s on it. An e-mail he sent yesterday that makes him wince. He pretends not to have noticed his own words skeleton-grinning at him.

“Gerry and Georgie tell me much the same thing,” Jon says.

Dr. Bouchard’s smile tightens for an instant and Jon can hear a prickly ‘the attentive Professor Keay’ as well as when it’s said aloud. He might kick himself for mentioning Gerry, but Dr. Bouchard says, perfectly smooth, “Then you might consider it more strongly.” He pauses. “I’m a little concerned, Jon.”

It isn’t the first time Jon’s heard that. It won’t be the last. He pretends not to know what Dr. Bouchard means. “What about? I’ve been playing nicely with my students, they can’t have that many grudges. Not this early in the term.”

Once, in the past, he’d attempted to argue that if his students found him so boorish, he shouldn’t be obligated to teach, and everyone would be happier for it. It hadn’t gone in his favor.

“They don’t think you’re grading fairly,” Dr. Bouchard passes back to him. He pretends as well, that he doesn’t know Jon is pretending.

“What do you think?” Jon says flatly.

“One of the complainants brought their paper with them to make their case.” Dr. Bouchard’s smile turns wry. “I told them you’d been more than fair.”

That’s actually nice to hear. Not nice enough to distract him, mind, but nice all the same.

“All right,” Jon says, looking toward the computer screen, their own little signal that he’s ready to come to the plot of the matter, “then what’s the problem?”

‘You know what the problem is,’ Dr. Bouchard says on occasion. Today he rests his elbows on the desk and indicates what Jon’s brought along. “Tell me how that’s going.”

Jon says nothing. Ready, and not ready. He looks away from Dr. Bouchard, to the antique clock on the wall. It’s an awful thing that produces a haunting wailing sound when the hour strikes. Dr. Bouchard had lit up like the sun while lecturing on  _The Rime of the Ancient Mariner_  during one of Jon’s earliest courses with him; Jon’s eye had fallen upon the clock in an antique shop and it reminded him of the poem, and he’d been so desperate to impress that he’d spent more on it than he could reasonably afford. It’s hung there ever since, and though Jon has suggested several times removing the bellows to cut its wailing, Dr. Bouchard insists the heinous sound ‘gives it character.’

Gerry’s never let him hear the end of it.

“Jon,” Dr. Bouchard says after a silence.

“You know how it’s going.” The clock hasn’t got a second hand for him to follow. He begrudges it that.

“Yes,” is the frustratingly calm answer. “You sent me half a draft of your dissertation last week. And then you e-mailed me to say you were throwing it away and to pretend I’d never laid eyes on it.”

“And yet you’re talking about it.”

Again, “Jon.” Still even, patient, and maybe somewhat amused. Dr. Bouchard’s spent years being patient with him, more so than the vast majority of people. He’s become one of the few people Jon can read, to some extent. “Look at me.”

Jon does so reluctantly.

“Why did you decide to throw away your draft?” He leaves out the number. He used to include it—first, sixth, thirteenth. Maybe he’s lost track or maybe he thinks it better not to say; Jon doesn’t intend to ask which is the case.

“Because,” Jon says, “it wasn’t good enough.”

Dr. Bouchard’s eyebrows lift in a pointed way. “I thought it was excellent progress.”

Jon catches himself before he’s snapped that it doesn’t matter what  _he_  thinks. It does matter. Obviously. But it doesn’t matter in the same way, with the same significance. He repeats, “It wasn’t good enough.”

Dr. Bouchard’s smile has gone, replaced by a level, curious expression. “Why have you been so dissatisfied with yourself so consistently?”

“I don’t know.” Jon wants to hide from Dr. Bouchard’s fixed gaze, and the way it says, ‘I know you’ve got it in you.’ He hasn’t lost track of his drafts, whether or not Dr. Bouchard has. Truth told, Dr. Bouchard hasn’t seen every draft. Many have winked into the void of deleted files ten or thirty or sixty pages in, written in a caffeine-fueled frenzy and reviewed and expunged again in a state more literate and so bitterer. His peers must have full first drafts in already. “Every time I write something it feels wrong again.”

Dr. Bouchard sighs. “You’re one of the most intelligent students I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with, Jon,” he says, and Jon feels a swell of pride. “I want to see you do well. But you can’t keep doing this. You  _are_  eventually going to have to produce something to defend.”

The swell breaks down into smaller, lapping waves.

“I know that,” he says. He doesn’t say that his heart wouldn’t be in defending any of his supposed progress thus far. That he wouldn’t want the distinction for having done it. “I will.”

His voice is surer than the rest of him.

Dr. Bouchard nods, and Jon cannot tell if he believes him. He flips through his desk calendar. “I’ll be out of town next Friday. I’ve got a guest lecture with Oxford and intend to stay overnight. We’ll meet the week after, and I expect you to present me with a proper plan of action.”

“All right,” Jon says, unable to hide his lack of enthusiasm. A plan is all well and good, but if the work isn’t right, it doesn’t matter.

Dr. Bouchard reaches across the desk to squeeze Jon’s hand. His is warm and has a power behind it that Jon appreciates, little as it does to reassure him. “You’ll get there, Jon. You’ve just got to finish something. You can tear your next draft to pieces  _after_  you’ve finished it.”

It’s all kindness. It’s not a helpful thing.

Jon lingers in the office a few minutes more over idle chat—which, when held with Dr. Bouchard tends toward classical literature—and then he departs. He’d hoped to feel better following the meeting, though he hadn’t actually expected that to be the case. He hadn’t thought to feel so much worse.

He checks his phone: nothing from Georgie, Gerry waiting on them both to come home and shower him with lasagna-related praise. That gets a smile from him, but he has no desire to go home. Not yet. Not now. There’s a different smile on his mind. He wants to—

_Yeah, kiss a cute boy, Jon._

Of course that’s what he wants.

* * *

Jon comes back with his hand caught on the door frame. The old document storage room sets itself back into place before his eyes, washing away the shadows of the King’s campus and replacing them with shadows more familiar and comfortable to him. He shakes himself fully free of it, forces himself to breathe in and out and in, clearing his head.

It’s a good thing Elias wasn’t here to see that. There’d be no explaining it away; an ordinary explanation would still have Elias forcing him to visit a doctor.

He takes a final moment to himself, tucking the wrong Jon’s experience neatly into a corner for further examination at a later time, when he cares to think of dissertations that don’t belong to him and Elias Bouchards that don’t either. He has other business to attend.

In and out, and in, to settle himself where he is. In himself. And then, on.

Jon steps into the storage room again. He flicks the lights on and has a better look around. There’s little sign that Martin lived here for any amount of time. The room has been cleaned—in a manner of speaking—since then. He checks the obvious places (the drawer in the table beside the bed, and the cluttered, half-empty bookcase they’ve previously sorted through for anything of significance), and a few of the less obvious places (behind the bookcase, an overstuffed filing cabinet). He finds nothing. He was always going to find nothing. There’s nothing to be found.

His hand is on the light switch again when he stops. His eyes fall back to the bed. He hasn’t checked beneath it. The floor underneath, yes, it was a natural place to check. He crosses the room in a few steps, steps that carry too much eagerness in them, and shoves a hand under the flimsy mattress.

It doesn’t take much rooting around to come up with a composition book. He flips through pages and pages of poetry. Rubbish.

Then a loose sheet flutters out of the book. He snatches it before it’s hit the floor and scans it, expecting another poem that’s just detached itself from the rest, understandably wanting to be rid of them. But this page is something else entirely. A letter to Martin’s mother.

Jon reads to the end. His eyes narrow.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So...at what point do I admit to myself that this fic is actually going to be like 50 chapters long? 
> 
> (Or more, because I have lost all control...?)


	9. the immediate effect

Come Friday evening, Martin hasn’t made any progress. At least, he doesn’t think he has. In fairness to himself, it’s difficult to actually quantify progress when the conundrum is a mirror that shows an alternate reality. Even as far as his job goes on a good day, it’s an especially tricky matter. It’s not like doing follow-up on a given statement, where he can make a list of what needs done, and there are facts to be checked over, police reports filed, witness testimony and witnesses themselves to be reached out to. (When they haven’t died horribly between giving their statement and Jon asking his assistants to look into it.)

But there’s no list for him to check off this time.

The only witnesses are himself and Jon. If either of them knew what was going on and why—well, then he wouldn’t be feverishly rifling through books fetched from the library, practically becoming a fixture in Diana’s ivory tower, staying up late not only because sleep is difficult to come by, but what if the next page has the piece of the puzzle that will give him a clear picture? He hasn’t even got the edges of it yet, and is missing the jigsaw box that’s meant to tell him what he’s working toward. All he’s got is another world bleeding through his head.

He pores over every word in every possibly relevant book, thorough as he’s ever been, and continues to take notes that are likely to be useless in the end. This research is practically a second job. Jon’s had no part in it, and Martin hasn’t asked him to. Not until now.

Martin stands in front of him with a tight-scrawled page in hand, which he foists upon him. It isn’t anything solid, just an old poem, author unknown, taken from the journal of one Anabel Munroe, aged 14, who’d copied it over from a new governess, who’d in turn heard it from a storyteller in another town.

‘Look through, look through,’ it reads, ‘and see what could be wrote. The story’s on, the story’s long, the story might be yours. Look through, look through, there’s treasure and there’s some with faces shared. Look through, look through, to see the land, to see the life, to see the wanderlings scribe.’

It continues in the same style for a number of verses, all of them equally poor, and Martin’s cleaned this copy up so that Jon can look at it without Ms. Munroe’s many tangents about an attractive stable boy with ‘dovelike, wistful eyes,’ her infant sister’s incessant wailing, and the scandalous gossip come down from London courtesy of correspondence with her friend Lisbet. Ms. Munroe was the distracted sort in her journaling.

Jon skims the page, outwardly disinterested and making no effort to hide it, for less than thirty seconds before handing it back to Martin with a shake of his head. “It’s an old folk song,” he says, his attention already turning back to the statement in front of him. “It’s not concrete and it’s more than likely unrelated.”

“I know that.” Martin suppresses a twinge of frustration. There have been a lot of those this week, not only with Jon, but with himself and reference books and stupid mirrors he should have left well enough alone on the charity shop shelf. Not to mention other Martins and Jons who ought to keep to their own heads. He reads the song again, to ignore the way Jon’s ignoring him. “But it could be something.”

“See if you can trace it to its origin,” Jon says, already tuning him out, and Martin can hardly stand it. They’ve never been close, none of them in the Archive, leastwise him and Jon, or Jon and anybody, but it’s worse these days. Jon tries to hide that he’s avoiding them, and Martin tries not to be hurt by it; neither of them are particularly successful.

“Sure.” Martin remains beside the desk. He ought to go, Jon won’t be happy about him hovering this way, but Jon’s hardly going to be happy when he walks away, either. It’s difficult to associate ‘Jon’ and ‘happy’ these days—if it was ever easy—and that twists something in Martin’s stomach. He begins to take a step toward the door and then stops. He wrings his hands, as well as the paper in them, and says, delicately as he can manage it, “If you ever want to talk about anything, Jon, I’m, um, around. We can talk about anything, not just work or the mirror, if you wanted to talk about—erm, Gertrude, or…anything.”

It’s a lame finish. It’s the best he’s got.

Jon’s head remains bowed over the statement. He doesn’t move. If anything he goes stiller. Martin might apologize for bringing up the subject. He might say he’s been stressed by the mirror, which wouldn’t be an untruth, and he might say he’d like a distraction, which would be, and wouldn’t be. Yes, he’d like a distraction, but it wouldn’t involve thinking on Gertrude’s murder. Stumbling across the body was plenty involvement. But Jon’s interested in the murder. Or fascinated by it, or frightened by it, though he hasn’t said so and Martin can’t think what reason there’d be for it.

“No,” Jon says, in an eventual sort of way. It hasn’t been long that they’ve hung there in silence; there’s just an eventuality to it. “Thank you, Martin.” He looks at the clock, and Martin can hear what’s coming next before it gets there. “It’s after five, Martin. You should be getting home.”

Martin says, “So should you,” pointless as it is.

“I’ll go when I’m finished here,” Jon says, and it’s all he can do not to sigh long and loud.

“Is there anything you need before I go? I can fix you some more tea.”

“No, thank you,” he repeats. “Go on.”

“Right,” Martin says. “I’ll see you Monday, then.”

He’ll see this Jon on Monday; he expects he’ll see another Jonathan Sims several times before the weekend’s out.

He slips from the office, pulling the door closed behind him, and stops when he sees Tim still beside his desk, idly turning the page of some book. “What’re you still here for?” he says; Tim’s usually the first of them out in the evenings. Especially on a Friday.

Tim says, “You don’t have to coddle him, you know. He’s an adult and can take care of himself.”

Martin stiffens. The tartness of his tone is somewhat at odds with the smile on his face; or maybe it’s not, the smile being the strained sort. He steps away from the door, back to his own desk, and begins to gather up his belongings, including the books he’s borrowing from the library at the moment. “Adults don’t always do what’s best for them. D’you really think Jon is taking care of himself? He wouldn’t have taken leave at all if Elias hadn’t forced him.”

Also, if Martin hadn’t ordered him out when he tried to return early anyway. It’s the only time Jon’s done as told, when it’s Martin doing the telling.

“Probably not,” Tim says, unperturbed by Martin’s manner. “But that’s not your responsibility.”

“I know that.” He _does_. But he wouldn’t mind if Jon were his responsibility, and he thinks that Jon needs somebody to be responsible for him anyway, whether he likes it or not. Which he wouldn’t, obviously. He’d have a fit over it. “He hasn’t got to be my responsibility for me to care.”

“Sure.” Tim closes the book and gives Martin a thoughtful look. “But maybe you care too much, is what I’m saying.”

Martin begins to rearrange his bag, seeking something to do with his hands. He wonders if Tim’s caught on, and swallows, because he doesn’t think Tim would judge him, but he does think there’d be pity, and he doesn’t want to be pitied. “C’mon,” he says, “let’s get out of here. I’m sure you’ve got a date tonight.”

Tim checks the time. “Meeting her for dinner in an hour. I’ve got time, if you want to grab a drink before I go.”

Martin agrees, grateful for the distraction. They take the underground to Soho, where Tim’s meant to meet his date, and duck out of the oncoming rain into the first bar they find, a place cast in incandescent light and littered with university students; Martin feels immediately out of place, but Tim orders them a round of drinks and raises his glass to anyone who looks their way. They talk, while they sit, about nothing in particular, though they steer carefully clear of work; there’s no mention of the Institute, of silver worms or dead women, or Jon. Martin considers mentioning the mirror, but they’ve decided to keep that a secret still, and besides, he doesn’t want to damp the loose smile Tim’s giving him.

“Time to go,” Tim says when they’ve been there forty minutes, something almost apologetic about it. Outside, the rain is undecided about if it’s really got the energy for this. Tim sets a hand on Martin’s shoulder and gives it a squeeze. “Try and have a good weekend, Martin.”

Then he’s off, a spring in his step.

Watching him go, Martin feels a pang of—not envy, exactly, but something similar. He ought to have something to do. If not tonight, then over the rest of the weekend. But his only plans are to research, holed up in his flat, lonely and waiting to be struck again, again, again, by the other Martin Blackwood’s world. It’s pitiful how much he hasn’t got a life. Tim has dates, and Sasha a book club, and Elias…well, all right, it’s difficult to picture Elias with a social club, but probably even he has outings with other stuffy academics who are as piercing as he is.

And then there’s Jon, who he’s sure has absolutely nothing even reminiscent of a social life, and who probably doesn’t mind it. Jon, who he should have insisted on staying with, to keep an eye on him. He hopes the Head Archivist doesn’t stay too long in his office, but it wouldn’t surprise him if he returned to work at two in the morning and found Jon still bent over the desk.

Martin points himself back in the direction of Tottenham Court Road, but wavers before he’s started off. He’s already in Soho, already out in the London evening, where everything feels so vibrant and alive, and there’s no reason for him to cut this venture off at its head. It might make him feel less pathetic, if only marginally, to stay out for a while; he doesn’t need a friend, or a boyfriend, to enjoy it with. Adults go out on their own all the time.

He casts a look down the road. There are nightclubs and restaurants, shops still open for another hour or two, at least one gay bar, and he’s not far off from the Phoenix Theatre, with the Palace Theatre a little farther off. None of them immediately draw him in, so he wanders along the street, ignoring the weight of the books slung over his shoulder, they can wait for later.

It’s several blocks down that he finds a music club indicating a folk rock group he’s never heard of performing there tonight, in starting soon, with inexpensive tickets still available at the door. Inside, the club is low-lit, teeming with people dressed in everything from semi-professional attire to incredibly short skirts, and it smells like a sweet smoke. It’s not his sort of place any more than the other bar, like he’s a fish jumped from one wrong pond to another; but he’s paid to be here, and maybe it could be his sort of place if he gives it the chance.

He excuse mes his way through the room until he finds an empty table that gives him a good view of the lower floor, and slides into one of the two chairs. There are people dancing, and a solo singer on the stage already, a woman with a guitar singing about stars and rivers and trees, and Martin lets himself relax. The woman’s voice is low, almost deep, and he thinks he could fall asleep to it.

“Mind if I sit?” somebody says beside him. “You’ve snagged my favorite table.”

“Oh.” Martin starts. “I can mo—”

He stops, blinking at the person stood there. The man is tall and lanky, with long blond hair that covers his ears and nearly his eyes, and for a moment Martin thought it was Michael. But this man’s hair is a shade darker, with fewer curls, and his face is less delicate, his cheekbones rounded, and he’s got a lot of freckles.

“You don’t have to move,” the man says. He’s holding two waters, and sets both of them down. “I can go find somewhere else, if you want. The sound quality is always the best at this table, though. I’m Lee, by the way.”

Lee. It’s not Michael; his heart still pounds with the surprise of it anyway. He reminds his tongue it’s got a purpose for being in his mouth, it’s not just there to laze limply about, and supplies, “Martin. Go ahead.”

“Thanks. I brought the water to help myself into your good graces,” Lee says. His voice is light and easy, and there’s a smile on his face, currently directed at Martin, and if he was hoping to make a friend while out, the opportunity seems to have fallen into his lap. He slides a glass over to Martin, who takes a grateful drink. “I don’t think I’ve seen you in here before.”

“I’m not very memorable,” Martin says, not because he’s unattractive, but he doesn’t stand out. His face isn’t the one most people would pick from a crowd. “Do you come here often?”

It occurs to him only after it’s out of his mouth that it sounds an awful lot like a pick-up line, and not a good one. He takes another drink, now wishing it was something stronger than water, any effects of his drink with Tim since worn off, and catches Lee still smiling at him, and hopes his face isn’t coloring. This is an embarrassment.

“Yeah, work sends me over here pretty regularly to check out the new acts,” Lee says, chin jerking in the direction of the stage. He takes a pocket-sized notepad from his jacket, along with a pen. Martin’s reminded of the composition book tucked into his bag, full of what would look a fiction, and to him is somewhere between dream and nightmare. He shakes those thoughts away. “I’ve got a write-up to do on Elora’s Folly this week. Did you come to see them?”

Martin considers lying, and saying yes, that he’s interested in the local music scene. “No,” he confesses instead. “I just wanted something to do tonight that wasn’t going home and being lonely—oh, god, pretend I didn’t say that—and that’s a stupid reason to be here, isn’t it?”

Lee laughs a little, and, having never heard him laugh before, Martin cannot tell if he’s being laughed  _at_. “I wouldn’t call it stupid. There are a lot worse things you could have decided to do with your night.”

Martin searches for something to say next, that’ll make him seem interesting. This would be easier if he were more like the other Martin. A lot of things would be easier if he were more like the other Martin. He’d know what to say to make Lee laugh, how to be charming and make a proper friend out of him. Maybe how to ask him if he’d like a drink, as long as they’re here.

The music grows muffled, and for a moment Martin thinks there’s something in his ear, or that they’ve decided to protest the volume of their surroundings. He does his best to surreptitiously rub at one ear; the only change is that now he hears strains of piano beneath it, and someone humming that sounds an awful lot like him, and though Lee’s mouth is moving again it all goes right through him. Martin swallows, and tries to relax into what’s about to wash over him.

It’s not as though he can stop it.

* * *

Cosy is quiet. There’s music chiming through the speakers, but the last of the customers have gone for the evening, the lights are down, and Martin stands behind the counter, adding up the till for the day. He eyes the empty case, glad he’s already thought to set aside a few sandwiches and Michael will have reserved a few sweets in the back, as he hasn’t taken the time to eat in several hours.

Michael and Georgie are cleaning up the kitchen; he hears Georgie laugh at something he’s said. Things have been more manageable with her hired on, and she’s only gotten better as her first week has passed, though there’s no denying they need more help. He has several interviews scheduled for the evenings next week. As an added benefit of having Georgie on board, closing up goes more quickly and he’s had more time than usual to putter about with his poetry upon arriving home. There’s also an e-mail from a magazine waiting for him in his inbox, its subject line not indicating whether it will be positive or negative; he hasn’t persuaded himself to open it yet. He finishes counting through the till and slides the day’s cash into a dated envelope for running to the bank tomorrow.

Then he looks up and Jon is outside the front window. Martin’s heart does something clumsy. Jon’s looking at him, but he’s not waving, or doing anything to draw attention to himself, and Martin’s not sure if the man was waiting to be noticed, or waiting not to be noticed. His thoughts fly, without his willing it, to the poem about the suddenness of human emotion. He shakes that off, leaves the cash envelope safely behind the register, and crosses the café floor to let Jon in.

“Hello, Jon,” he says, tucking the breathless part of himself safely behind the no more than usually friendlier part, which is still friendlier with Jon than it is with most of his customers. Jon’s a friend, after all. “Georgie’s just helping Michael wrap up in the back—you are here for Georgie?”

There was no reason for him to ask the last part. Obviously, Jon is here for Georgie, to walk her home. But it’s out there, now.  _I’m not going to make Jon uncomfortable by asking him out._  He’d meant it when he said it, and reminds himself of that now.

“No.” Jon shakes his head, his eyes on Martin’s face and then over his shoulder like he expects Georgie to appear at the sound of her name, and then on his face again. He sounds lost. He sounds, Martin thinks, much the same way he sounded the first time he showed up after closing, and he wonders for a moment if Jon wanders his way to him when he’s lost. But that’s a ridiculous thought to have. Even if there is a spreading warmth to it. Jon speaks slowly, and quietly, “No, I’m not here for Georgie, I’m here for…I don’t know, Martin.”

Jon makes a face as he says the last. Martin doesn’t take offense.  _He’s gone all moony over you, Martin._  Georgie’s been dropping the odd comment about that all week long.

“Go and sit down,” Martin says, touching Jon’s shoulder briefly, just long enough to point him in the direction of a table. He thinks Jon could use some help with direction at the moment. “I’ll only be another few minutes, and then maybe you’d like to talk. Or we can just sit quietly, if you want. That’s fine too.”

It sounds not in the least charming, but he’s not going for charming; Jon doesn’t seem in a state to be charmed, flirted with. Jon nods at him and walks across the room, where he slumps into a chair. Martin returns to the business of closing up shop, sparing glances in Jon’s direction and always finding him staring outside.

Michael and Georgie step out of the back while he’s doing the last bit of sweeping, Georgie carrying a box of whatever she’s decided to make off with tonight. The woman’s a bottomless pit, and apparently Michael’s pastries are excellent fuel for late nights working on projects. Martin is developing serious concerns about the obviously unhealthy lack of sleep taking place in Gerry Keay’s house, as well how unconcerned _they_ all are.

Georgie catches sight of Jon and stops, studying him. “I didn’t call you today, Jon. Goodness of your heart bring you in, or is it something else?”

Jon says something too quietly to make out. It sounds to Martin like, ‘I came for me.’

Georgie’s mouth goes flat and then downturns entirely, and she makes her way over to him. “Do you need an escort home tonight instead of me? I was just ready to go.”

Jon doesn’t look thrilled at the prospect of leaving; that would please Martin, if he didn’t look so painfully uncertain. He opens his mouth, but Martin swoops in first with, “I think Jon is going to stay here for a little while.”

Georgie looks back and forth between them. “Yeah,” she says, something settling into place on her face, like she’s decided Martin can be trusted with Jon, “okay.” She touches a kiss to the top of his head and tousles his hair a little, smiling when he bats her hand away and makes a grouchy sound. “I’ll tell Gerry you’re going to be late after all, and maybe we’ll save you some lasagna, if we’re feeling kind.”

“Yes, I know,” Jon says, more life to it than before.

“Right then.” Her tone goes brisk from head to toe. “Let’s go, Michael, leave these two to some alone time. D’you want to come over for lasagna?”

“Am I invited?” Michael says, surprised.

“You are now,” Georgie says. “I don’t want Jon’s chair to feel abandoned.”

“Ah, right, can’t let the furniture down,” Michael says, and gives Martin a pointed look that he ignores just as pointedly, and then it’s down to Martin and Jon in the café for the second time.

“I’m sorry about her,” Jon says, his eyes following Georgie and Michael until they’re gone from the storefront. “But thank you for…I didn’t want to go.”

Martin gives him a smile and does not say, ‘That’s all right, I didn’t want you to go either.’ He also doesn’t go to Jon immediately, though he’d like to. He says, “You’re always welcome here,” and finishes sweeping.

When he’s finished, there’s still a tightness in Jon’s face and shoulders. Martin sets to work fixing tea, an infusion of honey, caramel, and baked pear, the three scents intermingling in the air around him. He also plates up two sandwiches and slices of a simple but delicious vanilla buttercream cake. All of this he sets on a tray and carries over to Jon, who looks up at him and says, “You didn’t have to do that.”

“It’s no trouble, Jon.” Martin sets half of everything in front of him. “Another bad day?”

“Not Shakespeare essay terrible.” Jon pauses. “Not until the end of it.” Another pause. “I wanted to see—” His eyes drop to his food and Martin again thinks about lost Jons finding their way to him. “I wanted to be here. I like it.”

“That’s good. I wouldn’t stay in business long if people didn’t like it here.”

Jon makes a sound that’s almost a laugh, and Martin thinks about smoothing away the lines of worry and stress on his face. “You should have a taste of that. It’s something I just perfected, yesterday. I thought you might like to try it out.” He pauses, too. “There’s no caffeine in it. I don’t think you need that, right now.”

It’s not his job to see to Jon’s wellbeing, but the man hardly sleeps, and Martin intends to do what he can for him.

So Jon takes a long drink, a third of the cup gone before he replaces it on the table, his lips wetted, and Martin immediately wants to kiss that mouth. Jon’s lips part, his tongue darting out across the upper, which doesn’t help at all. “Is that pear?”

Martin nods, worried what he might say if he opens his mouth at this exact moment. Forget asking Jon out; he might ask him if it would be okay to suck on his lip.

“And you made this recipe yourself?”

Another nod.  _I wonder what you taste like._

At the moment, probably the tea.

“How do you do that?”

Martin wrenches his thoughts to more appropriate locations. He shrugs. “A lot of experimenting. A  _lot_  of poor drinks on the way. Michael’s accused me of trying to poison him a few times, and I’m not sure if that’ll be good or bad for me in the event that someone ever does poison him.” He takes a bite of his sandwich. “Are you all right, Jon?”

Jon says, “I’ve had worse nights.”

“That’s not actually reassuring,” Martin says.

“It’s just...my dissertation.” Jon rubs at his temples. “I’m not as far as I should be—I’m not anywhere, honestly. I’ve been starting over, and then doing it again, for more time than’s really acceptable. I’m lucky my adviser likes me enough to tolerate my incompetence.”

“I highly doubt you’re incompetent,” Martin says. “Tell me what you’re writing about.”

“People usually laugh.” This, accompanied by a self-deprecating smile that’s also got plenty of nerves in it.

“I won’t laugh.”

Jon sits straight up, like he’s bracing for laughter anyhow, and avoids Martin’s eye. “I’m writing about fairy tales.”

Martin tilts his head. “Why should I laugh at that?”

“Oh, you know.” Jon’s smile goes wan. “Jonathan Sims, pretentious bastard, earning a doctoral degree via children’s stories. People seem to find that amusing.”

“The realm of fairy-story is wide and deep and high and filled with many things,” Martin says without thinking, and then Jon is leaning toward him, hands on the table, and he’s glad the lights are dimmed; he doesn’t want Jon to see the hint of color that must be in his face now. He feels self-conscious, but pleased. “Tolkien, wasn’t it? I always liked that essay.”

“On Fairy Stories,” Jon says, a new note to his voice that Martin likes. “People usually tease. I’ve never had Tolkien quoted at me instead.”

“People are bastards,” Martin says, and Jon does laugh now, properly. “I’m not surprised you like fairy tales. There was bound to be something romantic about you.”

And then he shoves a bite of cake in his mouth, which is much easier than the alternative of his foot.

Jon’s staring at him. “One can scarcely improve,” he says softly, “on the formula Once upon a time. It has an immediate effect.”

In this case, the immediate effect is another rush of blood to Martin’s face.

“I haven’t gotten my Once upon a time right yet,” Jon says, and Martin’s not sure if he’s talking about his dissertation or this moment; maybe it’s both of them at once.

There are many things he hasn’t done tonight, pushing the urges aside as they’ve come over him. Now he reaches across the table to cover one of Jon’s hands with his own, emboldened when Jon doesn’t immediately recoil from his touch. “You’ll get it, Jon. I know you will.”

In his case, he does mean both of them at once.

“Martin,” Jon says, his eyes sliding from their hands to Martin’s face, his mouth twitching into a smile. “I appreciate you saying so.”

They finish out their little meal without saying much more, and when he’s gathering up their plates, Martin says, “I’m sorry it wasn’t lasagna.”

“I chose this over the lasagna,” Jon says, and looks away. Well. At least Martin’s not the only one blushing this evening.

“Gerry’s not going to hold that against me, is he?” Martin says lightly.

“Don’t worry,” Jon says, “I’ll tell him it was all my fault. Do you want me to help with anything before I leave?”

 _You might give me a kiss,_  Martin thinks. Aloud, he waves Jon off. “No, I’ve got it. It’s only a few dishes and the bins.”

He follows Jon to the door, and as he’s unlocking it again, says, “Jon, the other day, when you told me you and Georgie were friends, not—”

“That was awkward of me,” Jon says in a rush. “I don’t know what came over me.”

Martin pushes the door open. “No, I’m glad you told me.”

Jon stares at him a moment, then says, “Good night, Martin,” and takes off at a brisk walk, like he’s afraid of what he might say next.

Martin smiles after his back.

There was something of a Once upon a time in that, he thinks.

* * *

“Hey,” Martin hears as he comes back to himself. It’s a voice he’s only just started to learn, closer to his ear and concerned now. Louder than that is a woman’s voice singing. “Martin? Are you okay?”

“Not really,” he says without thinking, and then swears at himself. That part stays in his head.

His vision returns second, the club reforming in a whorl of colors that eventually solidify into shapes, like a rubbish powerpoint transition.

“Have a drink of water,” the someone says. Lee. That’s who it is. Lee, who he’s just met. There’s a glass in his hand, already raising toward Martin’s mouth.

Martin takes it from him and chugs all of it. It’s still icy cold, freezing his teeth and setting him firmly in his own skin. He can’t have been out of it for long, but it was long enough for Lee to notice, and that’s a worry all its own. “I’m okay now. Um, thank you.”

Lee looks alarmed, presumably because he’s just sat down with a stranger who’s proceeded to—have some sort of fit, from his perspective. “Do you need to go to a doctor?”

“I’m fine,” Martin says, squeezing the glass with both hands, which are shaking. He blinks back the threat of tears. “I want to see, ah, who was it again?”

“Elora’s Folly,” Lee says automatically. “You seemed like you weren’t here for a moment.”

You have no idea, Martin doesn’t say. He can still smell Cosy, the pear and caramel in the tea, though the alcohol and sweat of pushed-together bodies are sinking in as well.

“I’m okay now,” he says. “I really am.”

Lee looks unconvinced. “Maybe just some air?”

“Maybe more water,” Martin offers, his own little compromise.

Lee slides him the other glass without hesitation, taking the first, and says, “I’m walking you home.”

Martin pauses with the glass already against his mouth. He lowers it. “I’m sorry?”

“I’m walking you home,” Lee says again, a firm set to his mouth. Around them, people are applauding, the opening act waving and preparing to leave the stage.

Martin can’t look away from Lee. “You don’t have to…I mean, you don’t even know me.”

“Your name’s Martin, you let me sit with you, and when you were looking for a way out of being lonely you came to a music club to see a band you can’t even remember the name of.” Lee runs a hand through his own hair and Martin catches a glimpse of something white in his ear. “And I’m going to walk you home.”


	10. start at the right place

Shortly after midnight, Lee is sitting on Martin’s couch.

Martin can’t fully remember the last time he had anybody aside from his landlord over to his flat. He isn’t sure what to do with himself after turning the lights on except to say, “D’you want something to drink?”

“Don’t go out of your way.” Lee glances about the room with more interest than it deserves; Martin’s living room is distinctly uninteresting. He’s got a few shelves full of poetry collections, interspersed with the occasional biography and novel, as well as several pieces of art he’s collected over the years, but they’re not the unique sort that say anything about him as a person. Mass produced landscapes might do to indicate that he’s dull. There are no family photographs.

“You’re out of your way for me,” Martin says awkwardly. “I’ll make tea.”

In the kitchen, going through motions so familiar he needn’t pay them any mind, he’s able to think. The remainder of the concert had gone smoothly, thankfully. There was nothing on the journey home, either, only the cool London night and Lee, obviously far more comfortable being out so late; and Lee, who might actually like him. He takes a stab in the dark at how Lee will enjoy his tea, a splash of milk, and goes through his cupboards for a pack of biscuits. He might not be an experienced host, but he’d like to be a good one. Even if he’s no Martin Blackwood, owner of Cosy.

Martin Blackwood, Archival Assistant, will just have to do for Lee.

When he returns to the living room, Lee is at the shelf over his television, having located his scant music collection. He’s rifling through it with an immersed concentration on his face, like he’s giving each album his full consideration. Martin can’t bring himself to clear his throat and let him know he’s there. Lee makes the occasional thoughtful sound as goes from The Decemberists to The Lumineers, and something like surprise at Sufjan Stevens; he nods at the Imagine Dragons and Of Monsters and Men, the corners of his mouth tugging up when he reaches the Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera and other assorted relics of Martin’s childhood.

It’s not until Lee sets the CDs back in place that Martin says, “I’m sure you’ve got more variety than I have.”

“I ought to,” Lee says, “but I do like your taste.” He taps  _…Baby One More Time_  with a grin that Martin finds himself shyly returning. “You chose a good night to go out. Elora’s Folly’s a lot like The Lumineers. Are those chocolate fingers?”

Martin sets the tea and biscuits on the coffee table. “You said work sent you out for concerts pretty often.”

Lee nods and steps back toward the couch. “I work at Earful Magazine. Ever heard of it?”

“No,” Martin says apologetically, though even as he says it, he’s not sure it’s true. He’s almost positive he’s heard the name before. He can’t think where. Before sitting, he arranges the table, sliding one saucer and the entire package of biscuits toward Lee. “I don’t really keep up with music—er, the music scene?—sorry.”

“Nothing wrong with that.” Lee shrugs. “I’m Earful’s submissions editor, but I’ve been going out and doing more of my own writing about London’s up and comers in the last year. Elora’s just signed, and their label sent over an early EP for a review and I liked that, so I volunteered myself for tonight’s show. Glad I did.”

Lee’s smiling at him, and Martin’s experience in the area is admittedly limited, but he thinks it’s the kind of smile you give somebody when you’ve at least considered kissing them. Which is…somewhat unbelievable. He can’t possibly be being flirted with. He doesn’t even want to be flirted with. Not by Lee. It’s not that he isn’t nice (he is, obviously), and it’s not that he isn’t attractive (his smile has given Martin wobbly knees three times tonight, and it’s a lucky thing he was sitting down for all three), and it’s not even that Martin doesn’t like him (truth told, he thought about kissing Lee too, once, when he’d caught him watching the stage, eyes lit up, fully entranced). It’s that he isn’t Jon.

“Because they were good?” Martin might kick himself. He settles for burning his mouth.

“Sure,” Lee says, “and because somebody had to be there to walk you home.”

Martin nearly chokes on his tea. All right. All right, he  _is_  being flirted with. Lee’s not Jon.  _But Jon doesn’t like you._

“And,” Lee allows, “because they were good. Thanks for not relegating me to a less desirable table.”

“Thanks for the company,” Martin says, which sounds much less pathetic than his earlier ‘going home and being lonely’; he winces anyway.

They eat and drink in silence for a moment. Martin wonders if he should offer to fetch more tea. If Lee intends to stay long enough for a second cup.

Then Lee says, “So, Martin, what do you do? You a poet? Something literary?” complete with a nod toward the bookcase.

 _Sometimes._  Martin forces himself not to shudder at the thought of which books tend to pass into the Institute’s care. He’d never held a Leitner himself, but he’d seen the few in Artefact Storage and thought they ought to be destroyed, not kept on. “I write poetry,” he says, “but I work for The Magnus Institute.”

He braces for one of two responses: derision or polite bafflement. A large portion of London’s population has never heard of the institution, despite its long-standing presence in Chelsea, and the people who do know of it…well, it doesn’t often get the respect it deserves.

Lee gives him neither of these responses. He’s quiet for a moment, then gives the barest nod, almost a somber one, and says, “What’s that like?”

“It’s all right,” Martin says, which used to be truer than it is. Lee seems to be waiting for him to go on, so he does. “I work in the Archive, so it’s a lot of research and trying to get hold of people who have left statements or are mentioned in them. The head archivist passed away last year,” his stomach lurches, Gertrude’s body a nightmare-snapshot, and he hopes it doesn’t show, “and she left behind a mess, so trying to get that under control has been taking a lot of time. It’s a little weird sometimes, but mostly it’s just a job. The Institute is a lot more respectable than people think it is,” he finishes, defensive.

Lee nods again. “Life’s a little weird sometimes,” and Martin’s instinct is to either roll his eyes or give a hysterical little laugh, but the way Lee says it, Martin thinks this man has a proper understanding of  _weird_. He wonders if they’ve a statement from him somewhere. There’re only about one million left to be sorted through.

“That’s what the Institute’s there for,” Martin says, and he has the fleeting thought that if he’d never come to work at The Magnus Institute, he’d be blissfully unaware of wriggling silver worms and singing coffins and vengeful ghost spiders and awful hand mirrors.

“Are you sure you’re all right?” Lee’s got a chocolate finger in hand, but he’s not eating it, and Martin realizes he’s shaking.

“I’m fine,” Martin says. He’s hardly going to try explaining the mirror to somebody from outside the Institute. Lee would think he’s cracked. “It’s really nothing. And I had a nice time at the show, and meeting you, and—everything. Thank you for walking me home. You didn’t have to.”

He presses his lips together. Sometimes he’s just got to stop talking.

“Thank you for the tea.” Lee drains the last of it, and says, “Want to come to another show with me sometime?”

Lee isn’t Jon. Maybe that’s a good thing. He could do with somebody who’s not involved with any of this. Besides, it’s not like Lee’s really asking him out.

 _Not yet,_  he thinks, and quashes that thought. It’s late, and there’s no call to sit and analyze his feelings for Jon and any potential in his love life, and right now he just really likes the way Lee’s hair is falling over his eyes again, and he says, “Yeah.” Clears his throat, tries again. “Yes. That sounds good.”

“Yeah?” Lee extends a hand. “Here, I’ll add myself to your phone.”

He leaves, after that.

Martin glances at his phone on the way to brush his teeth. Lee Kipple. That sounds familiar too. But he sees a lot of names throughout the statements, and Lee is hardly an uncommon first name. It probably sounds like somebody else.

* * *

Weekends, in Jon’s recently developed opinion, are a deeply unpleasant experience.

He liked them well enough, before, but now they’re a thing that leaves him with far too much time to himself. Time he hasn’t the faintest idea what to do with. He hasn’t got a dissertation to work on, only a murder investigation that’s as effective as a broken down train for the time being. There’s the Institute available to him, nothing stopping him from spending another weekend in his office, but he’s not interested in hearing yet another lecture from Elias about overworking himself. It’s none of Elias’ business; that won’t stop him fixing Jon with a disapproving look.

Jon settles down with a book for as long as he can, keeping his thoughts firmly in his own head, his own fixed point. It’s not the book on Spanish sailing vessels; that one he’s already donated, unable to look at it without thinking of another Jonathan Sims. Now he reads about Ching Shih, history’s greatest pirate.

When he stands to stretch his legs and locate something for lunch, he thinks,  _I should call up Georgie,_  and freezes. That’s not his. It’s only drifting into his head due to the wrong Jon. The Jon who evidently dated his Georgina Barker as well, but came out the other side on friendly terms; there must have been less swearing, less shouting, less general unfairness on his part. For his own part, he’s been perfectly happy not speaking to her, has hardly thought about her at all, when she’s not being mentioned by ghost hunters or pushed into his face by mirrors. The bridge on this side is very well burned down to cinders and he can’t imagine rebuilding it.

 _She actually had some nice things to say about you,_  Melanie King had said to him when she came in to make her statement. Jon squeezes his eyes shut and rubs at the bridge of his nose, and mentally swings a mallet at the misplaced feeling.

Georgie isn’t his friend.

Gerry—Gerard, undoubtedly—Keay has never been his friend.

“That’s not my life,” he says into the cavernous emptiness of his flat.

And then he finds that he has to get  _out_. He slips his laptop into his satchel and walks briskly from his flat. Perhaps getting out of here will serve to distract him. If he spends too long thinking on Georgie or Gerard or the rest, he knows what will happen. It would be nice to go a full day without being wrenched out of his surroundings.

But it doesn’t wrench, not really.

Jon goes deeper into London than entirely necessary before settling on a spot for lunch. There’s a café called The Friendly Bean located several streets away from the King’s College Strand campus, and he pretends it doesn’t remind him of Cosy. It’s not as nice, certainly. The windows are smaller, the lighting too fluorescent, the air smells more strongly of coffee than of desserts, and the employees all look like university students. He orders a cinnamon tea and thinks upon his first sip that it doesn’t taste nearly as lovely as the pear caramel concoction that never really touched his tongue.

And then he glares at it, which is, from a strictly physical standpoint, much easier than glaring at the wrong Jon or that Martin or the mirror.

There’s nothing to do but open his laptop and attempt to find something with which to distract himself. His success is limited. He visits the  _What the Ghost?_  homepage and listens to a portion of the newest episode; Georgie’s voice, and not Georgie’s voice, says,  _Kiss a cute boy, Jon,_  and he turns the episode off sourly.

It’s not his.

He turns to the articles on the presumed murder of Mary Keay—it can hardly have been anything else, the way they found her—though he’s already gone through every one of them. This time, the photos of Gerard Keay interest him more. The face is the same, though this man looks like he’s done a great deal less smiling than the Gerry Keay who is a close friend to another Jonathan Sims. Their worlds have painted very different pictures—his mouth twitches wryly—of the same man. A darling of the art world, a university educator; the man who burned a copy of  _Ex Altiora_ , who plunged a scalpel into another man’s throat in a hospital, who was exonerated for his mother’s murder. Jon finds it difficult to reconcile the two.

Every time he looks up, Jon expects to see Martin standing behind the counter, chatting amiably with strangers, and of course Martin’s not there, he’s probably at home writing more poetry, or maybe he’s out roaming London; he doesn’t know a thing about Martin’s personal life, and neither does he want to.

Except that Martin has been lying to him about something. He’d like dearly to know what, exactly, Martin is hiding from him. If it involves the mirror in some way. In his head there is an image of Martin with a gun in hand, pointed at Gertrude Robson, and then pointed at him, and everything about it is—incongruous, jarring,  _wrong_. Martin wouldn’t kill an old woman, and he wouldn’t kill Jon, and Jon wouldn’t have thought Martin would lie to him, either.

Somebody laughs, a throaty one that sounds very much like Gerry Keay’s. Jon casts a wild glance about the café, a part of him expecting to find the man seated beside him even through the knowledge that this world’s Gerard Keay is dead. He tells himself it was another customer, though he knows already that it wasn’t. His body goes rigid when a new smell pushes its way into his nostrils, under the sweet scents of the café and then overpowering them, overpowering him.

* * *

The aisles of Lightning-Branch Books are cramped, threatening places that suggest they may choose to swallow the unwary book collector rather than give up their volumes. They are also, aside from Cosy and their own paint-spattered living room, Jon’s favorite place to spend his time. The bookshop feels like the sort of place that magic might lie in wait, that you might spot it there, if you only tilt your head to the right angle.

Jon was eight years old the first time he felt a tremor of magic in the world around him. There was a story he found, tucked into pages read-worn and yellowed, that begin with the words, “Once upon a time, a princess lost her way in the wood around her kingdom and came upon the silver-dew land of Fairy,” and ended with, “And so there was a piece of Fairy left in every story, for every child to lose their way.” The tale’s pages did not match the rest of the book in which he found them— _A Collection of Enchantment_ , curated by Liza Lang—lined with greater age and printed on very different paper. Neither was the story located in the book’s table of contents. According to its own final page, it was penned not by Charles Perrault or Hans Christian Andersen or any other familiar name, its author credited with only the initials J.M.

He read the story a dozen times, transfixed by the words and how fully they carried him into the land of Fairy; when he’d lifted his head, he’d been shocked to find himself still sat in the center of his bed, his grandmother calling him for dinner.

Then he’d set the book aside and found, upon returning to it the following morning, that the story was gone. His grandmother insisted he must have dreamed it into being, and as there was no sign of it having been torn from the book, no sign it was ever there, he’d been forced to concede the point, though he’d done it unhappily and sulked for days.

But he  _had_  read it. It wasn’t a dream, nor any other figment of his imagination. The pages had been rough beneath his fingers and he’d tasted the silver-dewed air of Fairy. And so it was that Jonathan Sims’ hunt for a fairy tale among fairy tales began.

If ever there were a place he might stumble upon the story again, he’d thought the very first time he stepped through the door and was hit in the face with the scent of books aged as carefully as a fine vintage, it was Lightning-Branch Books. It is equal parts used and rare bookshop, with the more valuable pieces of the collection being stored in glass cases, while the bulk of the inventory rests on cluttered, haphazard shelves that challenge shoppers to claim their prizes without being crushed beneath the weight of whichever precarious stack they’ve pulled from.

The shop is bustling this afternoon. An older gentleman sweeps his eyes up and down the shelves in this aisle; a number of university students edge through others; a cluster of young women Jon recognizes from previous visits holds court near the front window; another old man haggles with the shop’s owner over the price of some rare volume. The store carries sound better than it logically should, and Jon has heard Gerry laugh in delight at several discoveries, as well as the old man’s offered sums, every one of which has caused him to cringe.

“Any luck with the elusive land of Fairy today?” Gerry asks, stepping into view with a worn paperback in hand, absently thumbing through its pages. His fingers are clean today, rigorously scrubbed free of paint flecks. He’d come in with his typical dried-paint fingers once, and they’d been unceremoniously ordered out. Jon glimpses the paperback’s cover; it’s a Gothic romance, one that Georgie will no doubt sink her teeth into.

“I think I’m out of luck,” Jon says. He’s gone through every fairy tale collection the shelves have to offer this visit, turning over their pages in search of that sliver of magic. “Again.”

Gerry makes a sympathetic sound and makes his way past the other man to reach him. He’s visited countless bookshops with Jon, scouring shelves for hours, and only complained occasionally. Gerry understands his mad need to taste the lost child spell again; Jon understands Gerry’s mad need to add vicious, flowing strokes of color to the world. This, more than anything else, is why he and Gerry Keay have remained such close friends.

Now Gerry picks a slim volume from the shelf, a collection of ghostly tales meant to mimic the works of authors like Sheridan Le Fanu and M.R. James, Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton; he pages through until he gets a look in his eyes that Jon recognizes.

Sure enough: “Hold this, will you,” he says, foisting the book into Jon’s already waiting hands and digging a sketchpad and pencil from his bottomless pockets. Then he’s gone into his own world for several minutes, during which Jon casts a narrow look at the page; there before him is a description of a weathered, haunted home that reads no differently from any description of a weathered, haunted home, but for Gerry there must have been something special in it, and Jon feels a wash of warmth toward his friend.

When Gerry’s finished, he tucks his sketchpad away, looking satisfied, and takes the book back. “About ready to go to lunch then, or do you intend to keep digging?”

Jon says a rueful, “Lunch.”

“Cheer up.” Gerry pats him on the shoulder. “We can go back to Cosy.”

They’ve already gone for their breakfast. Jon had been horribly focused on Martin’s mouth. Martin had quoted  _On Fairy Stories_  at him as though it was nothing, and Martin had not laughed at him for his area of study, and Martin had called him romantic, and some of him is still there, hearing it again and again. Nobody has ever called him romantic; Georgie, in fact, had informed him three months into their relationship that he hadn’t a romantic bone in his body, and he hadn’t any reason to disbelieve her.

“Jonny? You in there? You know Martin’s not actually here to see the way you’re smiling, right?” Gerry nudges him and he comes back to the present with a scowl, which Gerry meets with a laugh.

Jon stomps his way out of the aisle. The shop’s owner, a short man called Michael Crew, catches his eye, brows climbing, and waves him over. The old man has evidently concluded his business, as there’s no sign of him.

“Leaving empty-handed today?” Mike sounds unsurprised. He’s learned well that Jon is selective in his purchases. He’s got to be; graduate students, the ones who aren’t supported by wealthy parents, are hardly swimming in funds.

“But I’m not.” Gerry drops his pair of books onto the counter.

Mike takes one look at the books and chuckles. “Feeding Georgie’s appetites, I see,” he says, fingers dragging over the cover of the Gothic romance.

“If we don’t,” Gerry says, “she gets alarming. You wouldn’t want to live with her when she’s unsatisfied.”

Another laugh, and Mike says, “I’m glad you’re in today. Jon, I’ve got something I thought you’d like to see.”

“Oh?” Jon perks up at this.

Mike disappears into the back of the shop for a moment and returns with a thick tome cradled in both arms, its weight tugging his shirt collar down to reveal the branches of his scar, a long-limbed remnant of the lightning that nearly killed him and then became namesake to his shop. The book is clearly old; it just has that air about it, like it expects to be looked upon with respect. It is leather-bound in a fading red, and Jon wants to run his fingers along its spine. He has the thought that he’d like to do the same to Martin, but he sets that one aside for later, because Mike’s placed the book in front of him.

The cover reads simply:  _Of Magic_. Jon thinks, then, that Mike is presenting him with some heirloom of the occult. He opens to the table of contents and finds that the book makes a study of all things fairy story. The print is so fine he’s got to lean in to read it. There are stories here that he has rarely seen printed in other books, and his eyes are hungry as Red Riding Hood’s wolf as they rove the list, seeking a story whose title he does not know, if it ever had a title, if it should be troubled to appear on this table of contents. He sees no suggestion of a J.M., but that does not mean this book won’t be useful to him. It feels, under his fingers, like it is whispering.

But.

“You had this in the back,” he says calmly. “I suppose it’s rare.”

“Very,” Mike says, careful, like any bookseller who knows he’s presenting a customer with something well likely out of their budget.

Jon gingerly closes the book and shakes his head. “I’m not going to ask. I’m sure you’ll be reasonable about it, but I’m also sure I can’t.”

Gerry eyes him as Mike returns the book to the back of the shop. “You wanted that.”

“I did.”

“Should I remind you how much you spent on that ridiculous clock for Bouchard?”

“No,” he says, “as I remember, and I’m sure that book costs more.”

Gerry rolls his eyes, and then Mike is there again to ring him up. He casts Jon a nearly apologetic look, like he feels badly for having shown Jon something so beyond his budget, and wishes them well until the next time they’re in. It won’t be long. It never is.

It’s also not a long walk from Lightning-Branch Books to Cosy; the first day they discovered the café, they’d been making their way to the bookshop. The weather is gloomy today, the clouds heavy and grey and undecided on whether they want to deliver the rain that feels both promise and threat. But it’s not particularly cold, and the streets are flush with life. Cosy is as crowded as expected, with most of the tables already staked out by university students looking for anywhere to study that isn’t the library. The line extends to the door; Jon hears Martin calling out orders over the din, and Georgie snickering.

“Fancy seeing you here,” says a man in front of them, and it takes Jon a moment’s work to place his name. Tim. Another fixture in the morning rush. There’s a woman with him, dark-haired and pretty, with thin-rimmed glasses, and he thinks this one is called Sasha, though she could just as well be Melanie. “You’re usually not, are you, in the afternoons?”

Gerry’s eyebrows lift. “D’you pay that much attention to who’s here?”

“I’ve got an excellent eye for detail,” Tim says promptly.

“Also,” Sasha or Melanie says, “you’re usually in front of us and he’s always complaining that you’re monopolizing Martin and Michael.” She considers. “Especially Michael.”

“Sasha!” So, Jon had the right of her name. Tim sounds more amused than bothered, though there is a touch of color to his cheeks that wasn’t there before.

Sasha tucks her hair behind her ear with a shrug. “It’s only fair to warn them before they consider becoming friends with you.”

“You’re friends with me.”

“I know,” she says regretfully.

Gerry snorts. “Isn’t there usually one more of you?”

“Melanie’s saving us a table,” Sasha says.

“We can ask her to fetch extra chairs,” Tim says, “if you’d rather sit with us than fight off the students.”

“Before you answer this,” Sasha says, “think carefully. He’s very annoying.”

“I prefer to think of myself as charming. Generous. You might even call me chivalrous.”

“No, I wouldn’t. Would you like to hear my alternatives?”

“That’s all right,” Gerry says. “We can handle annoying, can’t we, Jon?”

“Suit yourself,” Sasha says, and flits off, presumably to find Melanie.

At the till, Georgie looks perfectly in her element, all but bouncing up and down on her feet. Jon suspects the energy is coming from a worrisome number of Michael’s pastries. “What’ll it be, my third and fourth favorite boys?”

“Hang on,” Gerry demands, “when did I stop being first?”

“Michael and Martin have outstripped you,” Georgie says. “In that order.”

“Michael is spoken for,” Tim says from a foot away, patiently awaiting his order.

“Michael would prefer to have a say in that himself,” says Michael, arriving from the back with a full tray of fresh sandwiches, along with rows of muffins and scones for restocking. “I don’t recall being spoken for.”

“I’m spoken for then.” Tim grins at him; Michael’s cheeks color.

Georgie says a crisp, “You weren’t on my list.”

“He thinks he should be on every list,” Sasha says, and it’s long-suffering, established.

“Have you  _seen_  my cheekbones?”

Through all of this, Jon says nothing. His eyes drift to Martin, away, and then back. Martin is busy making drinks, a smile fixed in place, and Jon wonders when he last looked that at ease himself. That content. It might have been last night. Would Martin look that way if Jon kissed him?

“Come on, you two,” Georgie says, with a pointed look behind them, where the line has been and is out of hand. “Before there’s a riot, if you can.”

“Georgie,” Martin says, looking their direction; his face splits into a smile and Jon stays on his feet through willpower alone. He wants nothing more than for Martin to keep looking at him that way. But there are too many other people here, and Martin is busy.

“Surprise me, Martin,” Jon says weakly, and the way that lights Martin’s eyes makes up for the ineffectual visit to Mike’s shop. "You're good at that."

Martin doesn’t actually say anything, just turns away and sets to work. Jon lets out a breath and orders a sandwich, and hands Georgie his card. There’s no cause for the way his heart is behaving. Once Martin’s handed him his tray, he spots a student in the midst of clearing up their workspace and says, “I think I’m going to sit on my own. Dr. Bouchard expects me to have a plan for him in two weeks.”

“It’s a Sunday, Jon,” Gerry says, but it’s hardly a protest, and Jon walks away.

He doesn’t ordinarily choose to do his work in public locations. People are far too loud, and it’s a challenge to focus when he’s surrounded by them. Today, somehow, he sinks into it well, surrounded by the dull roar of voices and the sound of others typing, textbook pages being turned, laughter and conversation, Tim’s voice often rising over everything else. He takes a sip—raspberry and hazelnut sliding over his tongue—and tunes it out until it’s no more than a murmur around him.

“Jon?” a voice says. “Oh, you look busy.”

“Wait,” Jon says, because it’s Martin beside him, having already set a fresh cup of tea down. The line is shorter than before, but there’s enough of it that it seems Martin should be attending to the greater number of customers, not standing so close to Jon. He wants Martin to stay; he wonders which words he’s supposed to use to make that happen. “I haven’t paid for that.”

Probably not those ones.

 _The fairy tales ought to have taught me better,_  he thinks, feeling foolish with it.

“It’s on me,” Martin says. “As a thank you.”

Jon frowns. He’s quite sure he’s the one meant to be thanking Martin; all he’s done is show up at night to be useless. “For what?”

“Oh.” Martin shrugs. “Customer loyalty. Making my evenings more interesting.”

That’s an opening, an invitation if Jon’s ever heard one. He doesn’t know how to take it.

Then the moment’s passed by, and Martin glances away. The line’s getting long again. Jon isn’t sure how he survives these bursts of activity. He gathers up Jon’s empty first cup. “I’d best be getting back.”

Jon doesn’t want him to walk away yet. “Have you got a moment longer?”

Martin smiles at him. “Something you wanted to order?”

“No,” Jon says, and it comes out more brusquely than he means it to, and he thinks if he had wishes or a fairy godmother or some other magic, he’d use it right about now to make this moment better. “I lied last night.”

Martin’s brow furrows. It’s adorable.  _Kiss a cute boy, Jon._  Christ, this is an embarrassment. He’s not a teenager, he’s a man nearing thirty, and he shouldn’t be enamored like this. “Your dissertation is about something disgusting, like the use of cholera and tuberculosis throughout literature, not fairy tales, I suppose?”

“No,” Jon says again, this time through a laugh, and there it is, the sense of ease that Martin fills him with. A sort of Once upon a time. His own silver-dew land of Fairy. “No, I am writing about fairy tales. I wasn’t here because I wanted to be here—not that your café isn’t lovely, but I was here because I wanted to be near you, and I wanted to be near you today, and I’ve been wondering if you’d like to be near me, somewhere else, maybe with candles? Oh, hell.” He says a stream of profanities under his breath, a string of them that would have his grandmother red-faced and threatening him with a bar of soap while using the very same words.

Martin is rather obviously trying not to laugh. Jon likes what that does for his face. “Are you trying to ask me on a date, Jon?”

“I’m not doing a very good job of it.” Jon wishes he sounded less miserable, in this of all moments.

“Not really,” Martin says, cheerful as anything, “but that’s all right. Does it help at all if I promise to say yes?”

Oh, yes. That does help. Jon swallows. “Would you do me the honor of having dinner with me, Martin?”

It would be unreasonable to say Martin beams at him; but, Martin does beam at him “Had you given any thought to when?”

“Tonight?” Jon blurts out. “Or is that too soon? You’re busy with—”

“Tonight is perfect.” Martin quiets him with a hand squeezing his upper arm, so quickly that he thinks he might have imagined it. “We close at six on Sundays. Come and pick me up?”

Jon’s mouth has gone dry. He says, “Yes, of course,” and hopes that it’s less a croak than it feels like.

“Then I’ll see you then,” Martin says, and Jon wants to kiss him before he walks away, but this is Martin’s business and that would be—unprofessional, at the least. He settles for watching him go, his eyes following Martin all the way to the counter, until movement in his periphery says that Gerry’s slid in across from him.

“It’s about damn time,” Gerry says.

Jon might tell him to shut up. He looks down at his paper, where he’s somehow written out the better part of an outline, where the words ‘Once upon a time’ gaze back at him; he says, “It had to start at the right place.”

* * *

It takes Jon several moments more than usual to realize he’s come back to himself. The smell is nearly the same and so is the murmur of people around him. He scowls at the picture of Gerard Keay, still looking resigned on the computer screen, like being arrested for the murder of his mother was an inevitability. Perhaps it was. Perhaps he is guilty. Perhaps a thousand things.

Jon makes an irritated sound and slams the lid harder than necessary. He reaches for the notebook that he’s taken to carrying everywhere as a just in case measure. He works through what he’s just experienced, one moment at a time, making special note of the new facets; it gives him something to focus on aside from the wrong Jon’s infatuation with—

_Focus, Jon._

Michael Crew. He’s seen that name before. He’d had his hands on  _The Bone-Turner’s Tale_ , and he’d been struck by lightning as a child; curious, the things that were the same, the things that were changed.

J.M. Jon taps his pen beside the initials. He has a thought or two there, as well. Nothing he can confirm, until the wrong Jon finds what it is he’s looking for, and possibly not even then, and it makes no difference in either case.

_Once upon a time._

He doesn’t want to linger on how his life might have been different, had he fallen upon those words, a preoccupation with fairy tales, children’s magic.

_Once upon a time._

_Knock, knock, Mr. Spider._

Are their lives the result of a few changed words pushing them onto their paths? His lip curls. No, there’s more to it than that. Their worlds are fundamentally different; Jon doesn’t yet understand how, and doesn’t want to trouble himself to learn why. There’s trouble aplenty when he limits himself to the confines of this world.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much to everyone who's commented, left kudos, subscribed, or otherwise given this fic your time!
> 
> NOTICE: I'm getting somewhat overwhelmed with my workload lately, and so my ongoing fics are going on a brief hiatus, so I can have some time to catch up. _Brief._
> 
> _Through the looking glass_ will return on March 10th!


	11. the hopeful sort

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Y’all, that was a lifesaving break. I feel so much better now. Thank you very much for your patience.

As things stand, Jon has no interest in remaining at The Friendly Bean. He packs up his belongings and stays long enough to order a fresh drink, reminding himself all the while that Martin isn’t here, and he should be grateful for it. It occurs to him, once he’s made it outside, he hasn’t got a plan for where to go next. Surely it’s his flat or the Archive, each of them looming heavy and empty in his head, and neither with an appealing sway. He has yet to decide between the two when he realizes his phone is out, in his hand.

More than that: his thumb hovers over the screen, a millimeter from pressing call.

More, too, than that: it’s Martin Blackwood on the screen.

Only the awareness that he’s in a public location, surrounded by masses of people, keeps him from chucking the phone as far away from himself as he possibly can. He wouldn’t want to hit someone. They might file charges—or at least chuck it back at him. He considers shouting at it, but accusations of disturbing the peace are as enticing as the company of the Archive. Or Martin.

 _But I like Martin’s company,_  says a voice, a thought that is his, and isn’t his. Jon grits his teeth, jamming the phone into his pocket. He squeezes down on it, hoping that keeping himself conscious of it will stop him taking it out again.

“That’s not mine,” he says furiously, under his breath. “It’s yours and you can bloody well keep it to yourself.”

Jon shoulders his way through the afternoon crowds, decided without deciding on going straight home. His body protests the pace at which he moves, and any number of reminders he’s still recovering clamor about his head, Martin and Elias and Sasha and his doctors. All of that can piss right off along with everything in his head that isn’t his and shouldn’t be there.

“Nearly calling Martin—you can keep that to yourself, Jonathan Sims, fairy tales and  _calling Martin_.” He continues to mutter to himself, if only to keep himself aware, in place, giving his frustration some usefulness. “That doesn’t belong to me any more than calling Georgie does. We’re not the same. I don’t want to talk to Martin at work, I certainly don’t want to talk to him on my day off, he had to find that damned mirror, didn’t he—”

“Are you all right, Mr. Sims?”

Jon stops. He forces himself to turn, almost mechanically, and finds a woman with dark skin, thick hair, and a police officer’s uniform looking at him guardedly, like she’s yet to decide how to deal with him. Disturbing the peace, indeed. It takes him a moment to place where he’s seen her before. “Constable Hussain. It’s just Jon, and yes, I’m fine, thank you.” He gives her a painful smile, which, judging from the furrowing of her brow, isn’t fooling her.

She says, “You were talking to yourself?”

“Oh. Right, I suppose I was,” he says. “I was just, ah, talking through some things, I suppose.”

“You suppose?” Her brow stays furrowed. It’s hardly a new way for people to look at him.

There’s no need for him to defend himself. “It helps to say it out loud.”

“Right, I saw the erm—tape recorder?—before.” Constable Hussain’s expression relaxes just enough for Jon to do the same. “It looked like a bit of a relic. I’m surprised it still works.”

“Most people are,” Jon says with a wry smile.

“I thought you’d have something more up-to-date.”

“I’m afraid the more up-to-date technology doesn’t always work for our purposes.”

“Oh,” she says, and with a little wiggling of fingers, “Spooky?”

“That’s the business.” Jon’s smile holds fast, given the sardonic edge to her words. “Anyhow, I apologize for this little…interruption, and also the incident at the Institute.”

Her eyes linger over his scars. There aren’t as many on his face as his torso, and he’s gotten used to it, doesn’t even wince. To his surprise, she smiles at him, a smile nearly as dry as his own. “Honestly, I’ve dealt with worse. Weirder, too. Maybe not more disgusting, I would have to think on that one.”

“Have you?” It shouldn’t surprise him as much as it does. Any number of statements have involved the filing of police reports; it follows, then, that the police must have some amount of experience in dealing with the paranormal. “You’re always welcome to come in and talk about it.” At the dubious downturn of her mouth, he adds, “In a strictly official capacity—it’s what we’re there for. I can take your statement.”

 _And,_ says a sly, compulsive thought,  _I can ask you about Gertrude._

“Sure,” Constable Hussain says, the look on her face suggesting she has no interest whatsoever in following up, “I’ll keep that in mind. Enjoy the rest of your weekend, Mr. Sims.”

“And you,” he says, and they go their separate ways.

It could be progress, of a sort.

Jon continues his trek home, more effectively distracted from thoughts of either Martin Blackwood.

* * *

Saturday’s gone by well enough. Martin’s spent the day holed up in his flat, hardly moving from the couch except to refresh his tea, only once going far enough to check the mail. As Diana’s got him waiting on the arrival of a book that might, potentially, contain more information about the folk song, he’s been reading through a thick hardbound volume on mirrors and demonology; it’s remarkably dull, given the subject matter. Come seven in the evening, he sets the book aside and rubs his eyes. Enough is really enough for one day.

Also, he hasn’t learned anything.

All right, that’s not true. He’s learned of several demons not found in the Ars Goetia, and that there was once a Cult of Paimon out of Nottingham, of all places; Oxford or Cambridge he’d have expected, or even London itself. Probably there are several cults operating in London even now, if statements are anything to go by. He hasn’t forgotten Natalie Ennis, the church and the darkness. But that’s not really his concern just now. Yes, he’s learned things; those things haven’t been helpful, is the trouble.

“How deep am I going to have to dig,” he says, having reached a point of exhaustion at which it would be entirely unsurprising if the walls around him decided to offer an answer. They don’t, thankfully. Instead, his phone buzzes, then buzzes again, and again, and it’s not until the fourth insistent vibration of plastic on wood that he realizes somebody is actually calling him, and snags it from the end table.

Lee Kipple, the screen notifies him. He can’t help being pleased. “Hello?”

“Martin, hey, how’s it going?” Lee’s background is noisy, the music behind him much heavier than Ellora’s Folly. He supposes Lee must listen to a much wider array of music than he does himself. He’s never been the heavy metal sort, all that screaming. It can’t possibly be good for the vocal cords. Nor his ears.

“It’s going well, thanks, and don’t take this the wrong way, but I really hope you’re not calling to invite me to wherever you are. It doesn’t sound like my sort of thing.”

Lee laughs. That’s nice. Martin doesn’t often make people laugh. He pictures Lee at the back of a crowd in a dark club, taking in the crowd response to the musicians on stage. “No?”

“It’s not you, it’s me, and also the screaming.” Martin adjusts his hold on the phone when Lee laughs again.

“I didn’t think you’d like Evantika. But have you listened to any of those suggestions I sent you today?” There have been quite a few, Martin’s phone begging his attention far more often than usual.

“Not yet,” Martin says, making his way to the kitchen, his stomach reminding him that sometimes eating comes highly recommended. Times like now, when he isn’t feeling sick to death over some new nightmare situation. He’s only gotten a single flash from the mirror today, and it was hardly anything, just enough to catch that the other Martin, the happy Martin, was feeling—well, quite happy indeed, though he hadn’t gotten a complete sense of the cause. Something about that Jon, probably. It had hurt, for a moment, and also felt very nice, and he’d distracted himself from it by reacquainting himself with the finer details of Forneus; it had almost worked. “I’ve been kind of busy.”

“You can tell me if you don’t want to listen to any of it.” Lee sounds perfectly unconcerned in a way Martin doesn’t think he’s been since age ten or so. “I won’t be offended. Not everyone likes having music lobbed their way. Tell me to piss off, if you’d like.”

“I really have been busy.” Martin laughs, himself, and frees a container of instant noodles from the cupboard. Sure, he’s gotten better since Prentiss, but that doesn’t mean he’s got to be the epitome of health. “I’ll try some of it while I eat dinner, all right?”

“I expect at least two sentences of thoughts on every song.” It sounds like Lee is hoisting himself up onto something. Maybe there’s a better view involved.

“You know,” Martin says, scanning the instructions on the noodles, “we don’t all write for music magazines.”

“I know. That’s why I’m only asking for two sentences, not six.” Lee pauses, possibly puts a hand over his phone, and calls out to somebody else before he says, in a teasing sort of way, “Go and read a few articles if you need some inspiration. Listen, I’ve got to go, a few of my coworkers just came in, but I might—hey, Tommy—have a show coming up that you’ll actually like, see how you feel about the songs I sent you. Text me tonight or tomorrow?”

“Oh, yeah, sure.” Martin’s not sure if he’s disappointed or not. If he should be. He won’t miss the background noise, but Lee—well, he’s very nice.

“Or you can call,” Lee says. “Or you can leave me hanging, guess that’s always an option.”

“I wouldn’t do that!” Martin says indignantly. His cheeks are probably coloring. They tend to do that.

That gets him another laugh. At least somebody thinks he’s funny. “Good night, Martin.”

“G’night.” He takes the phone away from his ear and peers at it. While his noodles spend their few minutes cooking, Martin scrolls his way through the lists Lee has been sending him all day. He feels awkward, looking at his own meager responses—just  _thank you_  and  _even more?_  and  _:)_  and  _Again!?_  Sure, he’d been preoccupied with Naberius and mirror symbolism, and Lee doesn’t seem put off, but it’s a matter of etiquette, and maybe he’d have better texting form if he spent more time doing it.

That’s…probably not something to regret being a bit poor at, he muses, tearing open the flavoring packet.

When Martin eases back onto the sofa, bowl of noodles in hand, he pulls his laptop closer. It’s seen better days, was already battered when he purchased it, but it does its job just fine. He starts at the top of the list, with a song that reminds him a lot of Ellora’s Folly, with faster drums behind it and a far gravellier voice layered over everything else.  _Two sentences on each song._ He huffs a laugh. Lee probably wasn’t serious, but he idly copies down a lyric that stands out, something the song makes him feel, and then he opens up a second tab to take Lee’s other suggestion.

The Earful homepage is well-organized, with links for recent interviews, reviews, concert schedules throughout London—he can’t guess, at a glance, which of these might be the one Lee meant he might be interested in—generalized music news, gossip in the scene. There’s also, he notes with some amusement, an archive link for content earlier than 2013. He ought to visit an album review, but he can’t help himself. Earful’s archives are unsurprisingly better sorted than the Institute’s; it’s a low bar, after all.

A number of the articles here have the same byline, a Jennifer Ling. Just like Lee Kipple, just like Earful Magazine, the name scratches at something in his memory without fully dislodging it. He changes the song—this one is mellow, with something of a Southern Gothic vibe to it—and reads through one of Jennifer’s articles. It doesn’t spark anything new, but he knows the name. Maybe he should take the time to revisit statements they’ve worked through recently.

He shakes his head at himself, unnecessarily violent, his neck informing him he’ll be regretting it the rest of the night. He says a stern, “No.”

It’s the weekend, and yes, he’s still got the mirror to investigate, but that aside, he hasn’t any interest in thinking about the nightmare supernatural portion of his life. He doesn’t need to bring the Archive’s monsters home with him. He already has done, once. The mirror’s not a monster—probably, maybe—just a force, like a stiff breeze. There’s no call to think of the Institute itself, the Archive, the statements, anything associated with the place…except for Jon.

Martin thinks of Jon often, which is something he’s got very much in common with the other Martin. He hasn’t got a lovely café or a friend called Michael, but he does fancy Jonathan Sims. There’s a difference there, too, however, being that the other Martin’s Jonathan Sims seems to feel mutually, and the Jonathan Sims he works for…ah.

“Suppose I’ll have to live vicariously,” he says, and makes a face. What a wretched thought that is. He can live without dating Jon, he has done this long already, hasn’t he, but watching another Martin have what he doesn’t, experiencing it through him…there’s something uncomfortable about that. But it isn’t his fault or his choice.

Martin shakes away the thought and goes on to the next song, which feels a lot like a late autumn wind.  _Lee is excellent at recommendations,_  he reflects, closing his eyes to really sink into this one.  _I should probably thank him for—expanding my horizons, or something like that._  He imagines Lee’s smile at the praise, imagines it’ll get him some teasing. Lee’s smile is replaced by another, this one both more and less familiar, as he’s seen it a number of times already, but none of those times have really been through his own eyes—or have they, how is it that works, now’s probably not the best time for wondering, as Michael’s smile, the holding back a laugh smile, smooths into place, and the air not in his flat but in his nose anyway is scented with cinnamon and apples.

He thinks he hears himself say, “Right,” even through the other voices.

* * *

The clock on the wall, Martin is nearly certain, has turned malicious. It can’t possibly have been only a minute since he last looked. It’s twenty till closing, not much more than that before he’ll be leaving, with Jon instead of alone.

On a proper date, instead of whatever it is they’ve been doing at his café in the evenings.

It  _has_  been well over a year since his last date, and he hasn’t minded, hasn’t been looking for anybody, and he’s possibly putting more weight on this than he ought, but he likes the way Jon smiles at him, and he likes that Jon wanders his way to him when looking lost, and he really likes how Jon looked at him upon his quoting of On Fairy Stories, how Jon said, “One can scarcely improve upon the formula Once upon a time,” and he probably should have leaned across the table and kissed him, right then and there. 

All this to say: Martin is very much looking forward to his date.

He hands the coffee he’s been fixing off to its customer with a smile and a nicety, and cuts another look at the clock. This time it hasn’t even been a full sixty seconds, that bastard.

“You know it doesn’t get faster if you look at it more, right?” Michael says, bent forward to free a cinnamon bun from the display. He’s not laughing, but Martin knows him well, and it’s in his voice. When the pastry’s been presented to a pony-tailed, business-suited woman, he lifts his brows. “You’re not telling me something, and I do have a guess, if you want to hear it.”

“I have a date tonight,” Martin says, his voice steady.

“This date wouldn’t happen to be with somebody I know, would it? Blond, looks like he’s slept about an hour in the last year, ‘cept he looks at you like he can’t believe you’re talking to him?”

“He does not.” Martin snorts. “That’d be the one, though.”

“He does.” Michael shakes his head in a pantomime of disappointment. “And you weren’t going to tell your best mate?”

“I was, actually, but I didn’t want that to be the only subject of the da—”

“Did I hear the word date?” Georgie appears, having abandoned the till in favor of nosing in, and Martin would tell her to get back over there, please and thank you, but the queue’s run dry. “Who’s got a date?”

“That would be Martin,” Michael says helpfully, and Martin tamps down a ‘must you?’ Georgie was always going to know. Between working here and living with Jon, obviously Georgie was going to know. Martin doesn’t even  _mind_  her knowing, he likes her plenty and it’s hardly a secret…he’d just hoped, a bit, for that part to come on after the date itself.

“Oh?” Georgie rather lights up.

Martin casts about, hoping to make some excuse to extract himself from this conversation at least until tomorrow, when he’s sure they’ll pounce on him for details, but at least then he can have prepared himself better. He doesn’t want to resign himself quite yet to Georgie’s suggestively waggling eyebrows. Customers or not, there’s plenty to be done at the end of the day. He says, “Yes,” even as he steps neatly around Michael to head for the back. “Please try to do your jobs. You’ll note that prodding me for information about my love life wasn’t in the description.”

“No,” Michael says, “it was in the third clause of the ‘we’ve been friends for ten years’ contract.”

“Odd, you’d think I would remember signing that.”

Georgie snickers.

Martin elects to wash dishes, and it isn’t long before Georgie’s calling, loud enough for him to hear over the water, “Martin, I assume your date is with my good friend Jonathan Sims? Pity if not.”

He smiles, despite himself, and shuts the water off, and waits until he’s near enough not to shout his answer. There’s a towel in his hands, preventing him dripping all over the floor. “Yes, Georgie, it is, and would you mind not yelling things like that? It’s not professional, and we are still open.” Only for another few minutes, but it’s the principle of the thing.

Georgie has the courtesy to look abashed, her smile a little more sheepish. “Sorry,” she says, her thumb jerking toward the counter. “I thought you might like to know he’s here.”

And so he is.

Jon stands near the sole remaining muffin, looking self-conscious and somewhat less rumpled than Martin’s used to seeing him, as though he made an effort to go home and change, but everything in his wardrobe decided to be a little rumpled just to spite him. Also, his hair’s been combed. It suits him well. He’s somewhat stiff, his mouth a twitching line, and he looks between Georgie and Martin, clearly unable to decide who to address first.

Martin, who hasn’t had a chance to clean himself up, runs a hand through his own hair, which isn’t going to make a difference. He says, “Hello, Jon.”

Just like that, Jon looks a little more at ease, which is—well, that’s very nice. Martin tries not to let it go to his head. “Martin. I feel I should apologize for Georgie. Again.”

“You may as well not,” Michael pipes up. “You’ll just be doing it forever.”

“I would be offended,” Georgie says, “but you raise an excellent point.”

Jon focuses his attention on Martin. “I’ll just sit and wait until you’re ready to go?”

Michael swoops in before Martin’s got his mouth open. “Don’t worry about it. Georgie and I can handle everything here. Go and clean up, Martin.”

The look he turns on Michael now is a grateful one; Michael gives him a smile and a shrug, and says, “This is why you should have told me earlier. I’d have made you leave the last part of the day to me and Georgie, and you’d be ready to go already.”

“My mistake,” Martin says, and then to Jon, “Just give me a few minutes?”

“Of course.”

While he’s always gone directly home from Cosy at the end of the night and never needed to make use of them, Martin keeps a set of emergency clothes tucked away in his desk, where they haven’t even managed to pick up on the smell of the place. The ‘emergency’ he’s had in mind has always been a spill, not a date, but it pays to be prepared. He’s changed and gone back up front as quickly as he can.

There he finds the customers cleared out, Georgie sweeping, Michael counting up the till, and Jon with his hands in his pockets, glancing at the clock in a familiar motion that has Martin’s lips quirking. Granted, the sight of Jon does that well enough on his own. He says, coming out from behind the counter, “I’m ready to go. Do we know where we’re going?”

Jon nods. “I’ve made a reservation.”

“A reservation?” Georgie sounds delighted. “Jonathan, I’m impressed.”

Jon ignores her. “We have plenty of time. I didn’t know how long you’d need to finish closing up.”

“Isn’t it nice that he has such a good friend here?” Michael says.

Martin brings a hand to his mouth, torn between laughter and the urge to politely request that his good friend stop talking. “I think we should go. There are too many people involved in this date right now.”

“I’ve decided,” Jon says, pointedly not looking at either of the additional contributors, “the date hasn’t begun until it’s just us.”

Georgie pauses in her sweeping. “I’m just happy!” she says, and then addresses Martin specifically. “I’m glad to see Jon’s a bit less emotionally dense than he used to be. I was afraid he’d be years working his way up to asking you out, and by then you might have been taken, and then it’d take him a good decade to decide he fancied somebody new, but now I don’t have to suffer through watching that, and by the way, I do expect to be on the wedding party. I’ll plan the dinner.”

“It’s just one date!” Martin says, as much reminding himself as exasperated. He immediately wishes he hadn’t said it. It sounds like he cares much less than he does. “Um.”

“You’re right,” Jon says mildly. “We might discover we hate each other.”

“Sure,” Georgie says, “and I might be next in line for the throne of Norway.”

“You’ve never given me proof of your pedigree. Martin?”

“Yes, please, let’s go.”

“Have a good night!” Michael calls, and Martin lifts a hand in farewell.

“I’ll see you at home,” Georgie says.

“Where you’ll press me for every detail, I know,” Jon says, the door closing behind them. Michael’s already there with the keys. Good man.

They’ve gone two blocks before Martin says, “I assume the date has officially started now.”

“I think so.” Jon scowls at a man in front of them, shouting into the air. Or his Bluetooth. Then he seems to realize he oughtn’t be scowling, and gives Martin an apologetic look. “I’m sorry it’s not very impressive so far.”

“You’ve got time.” Martin hurries past the man and waits for Jon to be alongside him again. “ _I’m_  sorry I smell like coffee. It’s sort of…suffused.”

“I like the way you smell.” Jon cringes. “Oh god, never mind, can we say the date didn’t begin until after I said that?”

“I’m afraid not. It’s going on the record, Professor Sims.” Martin smiles at him. “But on the subject of pre-date things, I—about back there? That didn’t come out how I meant it to, I don’t really…I am hoping for a second date, if you are.”

“You were reacting to Georgie,” Jon says, a fond weariness in it. “A second date would be lovely.”

“If we don’t discover we hate each other.”

“If we don’t discover we hate each other, yes. Also, if you don’t discover I’m not particularly charming. Sort of the antithesis to charming, honestly.”

“I’d have expected the opposite effect from the fairy tales.”

“I always liked the magic more than the romance,” Jon says, and stumbles over, “not that I disliked the happily ever afters.”

“Supposing it ever comes up,” Martin says, looking at him sidelong, “do you think you’re more the youngest daughter, warned never to look on her husband’s face, or the prince cursed to wed the troll daughter?”

Jon blinks. Martin thinks he’s surprised him again. “I like to think I’d put in the effort to go on the quest, though I’m not sure how effective I’d be.”

“That leaves me with the troll daughter then.” Martin wrinkles his nose. “You’d best hurry your way to the castle. It’s nothing against trolls, but I am gay.”

“Maybe in this version you can have a troll son.”

“Oh, well that changes everything.”

Jon laughs; Martin wants to make him do so again, immediately. They carry on much like this, light and idle, all the way to the station and on the train, until they’ve reached the restaurant. It’s much nicer than Martin anticipated, and he spares a thought to wonder if Jon should be bringing him somewhere like this on a student budget; he’ll have to snatch the check first. Jon speaks to the host, who informs them there’s a table free now, if they’d like it.

The table is inside, set back in a corner where the temperature is just this side of too cool. The tables around them are, for the most part, occupied, be it with other couples—not that they are a couple, yet—or businesspeople, dotted by the occasional family or solo diner. The lighting is low, supplemented by coconut-scented candles. Jon pulls out Martin’s chair, and he nearly comments on the charm.

A waitress has arrived before they’ve gotten comfortable to ask what they’d like to drink. Another night, Martin thinks they might ask for a bottle of wine; but it’s Sunday, Jon’s got class to teach tomorrow, and he himself has a business that hasn’t enough employees yet for him to schedule a morning off. They order a single glass each to accompany the narrow glasses of water.

“This is nice. I seem to remember something about candles,” Martin says, and admires the tinting of Jon’s cheeks in the candlelight.

“It is what I suggested,” Jon says. “You don’t think it’s too much?”

“Not at all.” He can’t remember the last time he came somewhere this lovely for a date. Never, as far as first dates go. “It’s romantic.”

“You’re the only person who’s ever described me that way. Georgie would find it incredibly amusing.”

Martin scans the menu; he tries to give it due diligence, he really does, but Jon’s the more interesting thing here, reading his own menu, the color still in his cheeks.

“You must be quite the romantic yourself,” Jon says, before Martin’s thought of anything to say. “You like poetry. Who’s your favorite?”

Being a literature student, he supposes Jon’s probably more than passingly familiar with poetry, far more knowledgeable than most. He ought to name somebody obscure. Or somebody modern, to show he’s up to date. Or, he settles with himself, somebody he simply enjoys reading. “Sorry to be a cliche,” he says, “but I’ve always liked Dickinson.”

“Dickinson was an excellent poet,” Jon says. “You might have said Keats.”

“Have you got a problem with the Odes? I’m afraid I can’t have that sort of talk.”

“The Odes are fine.” Jon’s smile is thin. “I’ve got several problems with Endymion. Most of them are first year creative writing students who think it still the height of eroticism.”

“Ah,” Martin says. The waitress returns with their wine and leaves with their orders. He has a sip—it’s an excellent, fruity thing—and gives the glass an appreciative look. “It could be even worse than Keats. They might be infatuated with Byron.”

“There are plenty of those, too,” Jon says darkly. “Forbid they branch out.”

Martin grins. “Any fans of Neruda?”

“Occasionally, though I’m not sure they’ve noticed he wrote poems aside from I Do Not Love You.”

“That’s unfortunate. Lost in the Forest could do with some love.”

“I’m partial to Come With Me, I Said, And No One Knew.” Jon drinks from his own wine, and Martin considers him. They haven’t known each other terribly long, the majority of their conversations consisting of pleasantries and a few sentences more, the morning rush urging them along; Jon is studying fairy tales, and he is tired, and he knows his Neruda, and Martin hasn’t wanted so badly to kiss a man since his partner of three years left him an empty flat and a reminder that his mother had the right of it, though he likely hadn’t meant to leave the second part. Jon catches him looking and says, “Something on your mind?”

“I was just thinking,” Martin says. “I’m glad you asked me to dinner.”

Jon appears to consider the appropriate response. Eventually he says a slow, “I was going to apologize for arriving early, when I knew you would still be closing up. But I was feeling impatient, and I’m not sorry. I should have asked you sooner. Georgie’s not incorrect about my dating…ineptitude.”

Martin indicates the restaurant around them. “I wouldn’t call this inept.”

“Consider it my belated thank you.”

“For?”

“Allowing me to sit in your closed café.”

Martin waves this off. “That’s all right, it was nice having you there. I’d prefer to consider this strictly a date, not a thank you.” He raises his glass. “As we haven’t discovered a mutual hatred, the first of many?”

Jon’s mouth twitches. He raises his own glass. “The first of many.”

“Glad we’ve got that sorted out already,” Martin says. “Now I don’t have to worry over it the rest of the night.”

The rest of the night—though it’s not the rest of the night, not really—is spent in deep discussion of poetry, of fairy tales, of stories about Georgie and Michael and Gerry, and enough laughter that Martin’s stomach hurts. They turn down dessert, and without properly considering it, Martin says, “Do you want to go?” and he does not mean to end the night here.

“Yes,” Jon says, “I think I do.”

Martin blames the giddiness on the wine, no matter it was only a glass and he finished it an hour ago. He takes the check, against Jon’s protests that he ‘chose the restaurant and should be responsible for paying for it,’ and they’re on their way. It’s gotten darker outside, the sun arcing its way down for the evening.

As they navigate away from the restaurant, Martin feels like his arms are useless, unformed lumps of clay at his sides. He reaches for Jon’s hand, sliding their fingers together. It’s nothing to be nervous about, as a grown man, but he is. “Is this all right?”

Jon’s hand shifts, and he thinks for a moment it’s to pull away; but Jon only adjusts his hold. Martin glances at him to find Jon looking at him as though he personally hung the moon in the air, and he doesn’t want to look away, but crashing into people is generally considered impolite. “It’s more than all right.”

Several minutes later, Jon says, “Martin.”

“Yes?”

“Where are we going?”

“Ah.” Somehow it hadn’t occurred to him he’d begun toward the station on autopilot. “My flat, if that’s okay? Or we can part ways. I promise not to take offense. I know we both have early mornings.”

Jon shakes his head. “Your flat sounds lovely and lacking in my flatmates. Have you got any? Do you and Michael…?”

“No, no, I live alone.” Martin pauses, only now considering the implications of his invitation. “But I’m not trying to bring you home for—” Oh, now he’s really gone and made it awkward, hasn’t he. Business aside, it’s no small wonder he hasn’t been on a date in an age. “Never mind, pretend I didn’t say anything.”

“I’m afraid I can’t do that,” Jon says, and he sounds so serious that Martin looks at him in alarm, mouth already open to protest—and Jon is smiling. “It’s gone on the record, Mr. Blackwood.”

“You know,” Martin says ponderously, “I’ve just decided Gerry was right.”

“About what?”

Martin elbows him playfully. “You’re a right bastard.”

Jon barks a laugh.

“But,” Martin says, “you’re a charming bastard.”

“Does that mean you still want me to come home with you?” Jon really should smile more often. Or maybe he shouldn’t. Martin might not have been able to fight the urge to kiss him this long if Jon regularly looked at him that way— _like he can’t believe you’re talking to him_ —and more people might have taken an interest.

“As long as you’d like to.”

“I would.”

Martin’s flat is nearer to Cosy, and the trip back a comfortable one. As he escorts Jon several flights up, he mentally takes stock of the place. He spends too little time there for a mess to build. Opening the door and finding the switch is confirmation. Everything is neatly in its place, aside from the poetry magazine he’s halfway through; he’d left off dissecting an awfully dry poem about deserts, an intentional, stylistic choice that left him parched.

“You can sit wherever you like,” Martin says. “I’ll go ahead and fix tea.”

“You’ve done that all day,” Jon points out. “You don’t have to do it for me here, too.”

“I like to.” Martin disappears into the kitchen. It’s on the smaller end, but as he only cooks for one, the lack of counter space is no bother. He hums to himself, more than satisfied with how the night’s gone so far. It’s not long before he’s carrying two cups back to the living room, where he finds Jon’s taken a seat on the couch and bent forward to flip through the magazine.

Jon says, without looking up, “That smells like heaven.”

“I’d think heaven for you is a library, and I hope my tea doesn’t smell like dusty pages. No offense to the dusty pages. Admittedly, not a tea flavor I’ve experimented with.” He sets the cups down carefully. It’s possible they’re on the over-full side, but one can never have too much caramel. “I prefer fruit, chocolate, those old things.”

Jon’s laugh is quickly approaching the top of the list of Martin’s favorite sounds. He looks up from the magazine. “Do you write poetry yourself? I don’t think you’ve said.”

“Oh.” Martin tugs at his collar, suddenly warm. He has a seat beside Jon, occupying his hands with picking at his trousers. “Yes, I do. I’ve had a few published.”

“I’d like to read them sometime,” Jon says, and Martin believes he may be blushing. It’s one thing for strangers to read his words; it feels like altogether another for Jon to read them. But Jon doesn’t seem to expect an answer just now. He’s ignoring the tea, his eyes at rest on Martin’s face. “Would it be all right if I kiss you?”

That one’s much easier to answer. Martin swallows. “I hoped you would.”

Jon touches his face, careful with him like he’s closer to glass than flesh and bone. He has a moment, as Jon’s thumb runs below his lip, of concerned,  _I hope I’m not awful for being out of practice_ ; and then, easy as you please, Jon is kissing him. Their first kiss is but a brush of lips, like a breath asking permission again, and Martin leans into it, wanting terribly to get closer and not sure if he’s allowed.

Martin says, still close enough to feel Jon’s breath, “I’ve thought about that a lot.”

“You could have kissed me,” Jon says.

“Ah, but I fixed the tea.”

Jon huffs a laugh. “I wasn’t aware that made a difference.”

“Well, I’ve only just made it u—”

Jon kisses him again, which stops him talking. It’s not so chaste this time, a firmer press of lips and then Jon’s fingers sliding, gentle, around the back of his neck. Martin makes a pleased little sound, lets his hands rest flat on Jon’s chest and his lips fall parted in open invitation. His fingers curl when Jon’s tongue sweeps into his mouth, and then Jon’s other hand is on his side, pulling him in, and there’s really no choice but for Martin to lift onto his knees and straddle Jon’s hips.

“Too much?” he asks. All right, maybe there  _were_  other choices, but this one’s put the color back in Jon’s cheeks, and Martin likes being looked at this way.

“More comfortable,” Jon says, and that’s all the prompting Martin needs for the next kiss, dipping his own tongue into Jon’s mouth, and if he  _is_ awful courtesy of his dry spell, it’s clearly not bothering Jon, who’s kissing him back with an ardor that has him pushing still closer, and it feels like he’s been waiting for this, exactly this, since the first moment Jon shuffled into his café, only he hadn’t noticed. He’s certainly noticed now. He wonders if Jon feels the same; asking doesn’t seem worth the loss of Jon’s tongue, which is doing lovely, teasing things to the roof of his mouth.

The kisses they trade are languid, but heated, renewing and tightening Martin’s grasp on Jon’s shirt, and he makes a sound of objection when Jon pulls away and does not immediately kiss him again. Jon’s breathing has picked up, and his eyes rest on Martin’s lips, and Martin hopes that means he’s not finished with them. He has no idea of the time, only that he wants this to go on, and on, and he shifts in Jon’s lap, and possibly he should have realized before now that Jon is hard.

In his defense, he has been somewhat distracted by the slick exploration taking place higher up.

“Oh,” Martin breathes, his own skin flushing dark, and Jon’s opening his mouth, looking embarrassed, so he rolls his hips, and whatever Jon might have said turns into a groan; Martin’s body doesn’t need more encouragement than that. Another, torturously slow roll of his hips has Jon’s hands closing there, and Jon’s hips cant up, and Martin makes a soft sound, resting his forehead on Jon’s shoulder. He murmurs, “That’s good.”

They rock against each other easily, settling into an unhurried, almost relaxing rhythm. Martin’s breath stutters when he’s close, orgasm building slowly, and he lifts his head to press another kiss to Jon’s mouth, harder than before, just a hint of desperation behind it, and then he’s shuddering, pleasure washing over him. His hips keep moving, and it’s not long before Jon strains up against him, moans into his mouth, and sinks onto the couch.

It’s Jon who breaks the kiss, though he does it reluctantly. “I don’t usually—on a first date, I don’t…” he sounds dazed, startled by himself.

“Neither do I,” Martin says, seeing no need to remove himself from Jon’s lap just yet. He hasn’t come in his pants since his fumbling teenage years. It doesn’t bother him that he’s done so now, especially having done it—like that, and with Jon. He leans back, wanting a better look at Jon’s face. “Do you wish we hadn’t?”

Jon studies him for a long moment, like he’s a fairy tale in need of categorization. He says, “Not at all,” and leans forward, and this kiss is brief, but it says plenty.

Martin eases himself from Jon’s lap and tucks himself in beside him. He eyes the teacups. As he hasn’t any idea how long they’ve spent kissing, he imagines it’s probably cold. Not worth the risk to try it. “You can stay here tonight, if you like.”

“Martin,” Jon says, leaning his head back, which is no kind of answer, and Martin glances at him. His trousers are growing a tad uncomfortable; Jon’s likely aren’t any better. “I should have said your number, when you asked if there was something I wanted to order this afternoon.”

“Oh, god, you haven’t been listening to Tim, have you?”

“It would have been smoother.”

Martin wrinkles his nose. “It would have been awful. I liked the way you asked me.”

“The way I asked you  _was_  awful.”

“Yeah.” Martin forces himself up from the couch and collects the cups. “But it was awfully you. Are you going to stay?”

Jon rubs at his forehead. He still looks like he hasn’t fully absorbed the situation. Martin considers the merits of forgoing sleep and spending the night with his mouth on Jon’s, but responsibility and all that, he tells himself. “Are you sure it’s all right?”

Martin nods. “I’ll find you something to sleep in.”

Martin hasn’t shared a bed with another person in eons. It’s an extraordinarily easy thing, he finds, to fall asleep with his head on Jon’s chest.

* * *

The same song is playing; all that, in the span of a few moments.

Martin breathes out hard, the smell of his own flat flooding back in, the instant noodles container the strongest. He shuts his eyes, if they were open to begin with, and keeps them that way until he’s confident they’ll be doing their job once he looks around.

That really wasn’t what he’d meant when he said live vicariously. His body disagrees. Martin is mortified as sensation—his own sensation, the dry air of his flat rather than the press of Jon’s mouth, and this isn’t the time to wonder if Jon’s mouth would feel the same, if Jon’s tongue would slide into his mouth like that, if Jon would hold onto his hips— _godammit_ —sensation returns, and he’s gone erect. He shoves the half-full noodle container away, practically knocking it over in his haste to flee to the bathroom.

He strips down to nothing and turns the water as frigid as it will go, and stands beneath it without flinching. How’s he supposed to face Jon at work when he’s just listened to him moan, seen what he looks like following an orgasm?

“It wasn’t him,” he reminds himself, as it wasn’t. They’re two different men, just like he and the happy Martin are two different men, but—Martin has always been the hopeful sort. Life’s (and his mother’s) constant suggestions that he shouldn’t be have done nothing to dampen his outlook.

He and the other Martin are both attracted to Jonathan Sims, no matter the range of differences between them. And that Jon, from what he’s experienced, is not so different from the one he knows.

Martin hasn’t often let himself entertain the thought that Jon might want the sorts of things he wants. It’s difficult, now, icy water ravaging his skin, to stop himself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (Yes, I was thinking about Hereditary while writing this chapter. I think about Hereditary a lot.)


	12. a (pleasant) preoccupation

Sunday is more than half over when Martin finally persuades himself to fetch his spiral notebook and put down his latest experience with the mirror’s universe. He recalls the date in more detail than strictly necessary: the number of times they laughed, the poems and fairy tales they referenced, the way that Jon looked at a Martin who isn’t him. He finds himself chewing at his bottom lip. It wouldn’t look like this, if he and Jon went on a date. He knows it wouldn’t. They might discuss poetry, but they wouldn’t discuss fairy tales; their line of work is sort of the opposite.

Anyway, he’d never heard of ‘East of the Sun, West of the Moon’ until today, when he got creative with the search engine, looking up every variation on ‘trolls’ and ‘youngest daughter’ he thought of. And fairy tales aren’t what his—not  _his_ —Jon likes. It’s unpleasant to realize he doesn’t know, really, what Jon does like. They don’t talk about their private lives.

They don’t talk.

Still, it was a nice date. One he would have enjoyed if it belonged to him. It feels distantly magical as he writes, a bit of a fairy tale itself. Maybe the other Martin Blackwood will have his happily ever after. One of them ought to. His hand only shakes a little around the pen, but he freezes altogether when he reaches the part of the night where Martin plopped himself onto Jon’s lap without hesitating (he could never, he’s not that smooth or that brave, and Jon wouldn’t stand for it), and he can still hear the way Jon moaned, the voice just the same, and he shifts uncomfortably. He thinks _Prentiss, worms, Gertrude, tunnels_ —before yesterday’s problem can arise again.

This part, he summarizes much more succinctly. If he and Jon ever swap notes, he doesn’t want to have written the specifics of any sex their counterparts are having, not the way Jon looked at Martin’s lips or the rhythm set by their hips. It might raise awkward questions; Jon might speak to him less than he already does, or Jon might be disgusted by him, or Jon might pity him, and he doesn’t know which possibility scares him the most.

Martin puts the notebook away quickly. He plays the best of the songs Lee sent him yesterday, and sends off a,  _Hey :) You want to talk?_  and puts the mirror out of his mind. It’s shockingly cooperative.

* * *

He goes the entire day without so much as a flicker.

Jon considers retrieving the mirror from its storage unit.

Unfortunately, that’s one thought he can’t pin on the wrong Jonathan Sims.  _He_  hasn’t got a mirror. If he had, with his fairy tale fascination, he’d likely be much more enthusiastic about it.

The thought comes to him uncalled for on Sunday evening as he stands at his stove fixing an uninspired grilled cheese. The mirror has left him in peace today and still he’s hardly been able to focus. He daren’t hope this reprieve will be a lasting thing. Relaxation is a distant memory. It already was, before the mirror, but it is even more so since.

 _What could it hurt?_ It’s the third time it has crossed his mind in as many hours. To just go and have a look, to study the words on its back, to spend a minute or two touching it, note if there’s a difference in holding it or having it far away. Would he notice the distance shortening as first the train and then his feet brought him closer? He doesn’t think he would, but that part of him that has always been too curious to know any better wheedles at him to find out.  _What could it hurt, Jon?_

“Stop that,” he says, and is pleased when he sounds more stern than frustrated. Never mind he feels more of the latter. He flips his grilled cheese, which is nearing a satisfactory level of crispy.

What he needs is a distraction from—from all of it. Not only the mirror, but Gertrude as well. The mirror distracts him from Gertrude; Gertrude distracts him from the mirror. It’s not healthy to spend every waking hour, and indeed many of the sleeping ones, obsessing over one or the other. He would like to pretend he doesn’t obsess over the mirror. Jon tells himself any number of lies; his mind will not allow him this one. He doesn’t especially want to be distracted from Gertrude, only supposes he needs to be.

There’s got to be  _something_  reasonable for him to focus on.

He might, he supposes, reach out to Georgie. The wrong Jon dated his Georgie and has remained her friend through it, and though he suspects that one wasn’t so thoroughly a bastard as he was himself, it might not hurt to try. The idea presents itself as perfectly reasonable; Jon shies from it. His phone sits on the countertop to tempt him, and being tempted to call Georgie is significantly better than his absent-minded near calling of Martin, but—he doesn’t know where it’s come from.

Maybe it  _is_  his. He has missed her, sometimes, throughout the years.

Maybe it is not. He had not considered trying to reconnect, until the mirror.

He’s never gotten rid of her number.

Jon eats his grilled cheese and does not contact Georgie. If he’s going to talk to her, he would prefer it not be due to the impinging thoughts of a man he has never been. It wouldn’t be fair.

* * *

It would not be accurate to say the mirror stretches its muscles. It is, after all, just that: a mirror. There are no muscles for stretching.

 But the mirror stretches—awareness, consciousness, listening. There is more effort to be made for two. The mirror does not mind.

* * *

It’s a good thing Jon hadn’t gotten comfortable with the mirror granting him peace. There’s a wave of it, of  _him_ , come Monday morning as he’s rolling out of bed, his feet having just touched the floor when it comes on. His own bedroom does not fade around him, the sensation of his blanket beneath his fingers, but there is a smell that would be pleasant if it belonged, and the sound of even breathing, and a contentment he doesn’t recognize.

Jon tells himself perhaps its hold is loosing. Yesterday, nothing. Now, this. He knows it’s another lie.

The Archive may not truly serve as a distraction (how can it, when this is where Gertrude died?), but it does give him something else to think about. The endless stacks to sort through have almost become a respite. He wonders idly, as he sips water and rifles through a pile of old statements, if the conditions in which Gertrude kept the Archive had anything to do with her murder. If Elias decided to pull a trigger rather than urge her gently into your more standard retirement. The thought tastes bitter and he chides himself for thinking it. There’s nothing  _amusing_  about any of this.

Movement in the doorway has him lifting his head. It’s only Tim, a curious expression on his face. “Jon,” he says, “I know you get bored, but I thought we all agreed you weren’t going to burgle museums on the weekends.”

Jon sighs. “What are you talking about?”

Tim jerks a thumb behind him. “The police are here for you. One of them who came in for, you know.”

“Ms. Hussain?” Jon begins to rise from his seat.

“Yeah.” Tim’s eyebrows lift. “Send her in, then?”

“Yes.” Jon frees the tape recorder from its place beneath a stack of paperwork that really ought to have made its way upstairs by now. Maybe today. He forages and inserts a fresh tape from the center drawer. There’s no point in trying the laptop, he can somehow feel that much. Anything she shares with him will be real, though he doesn’t know how he knows.

“Good morning, Jon,” Ms. Hussain says as she comes through the door. The expression on her face suggests she’s not fully settled herself with being here. Outsiders to the Institute often wear that sort of look.

“Good morning,” he says, sitting back in his chair. “I didn’t expect—Tim, if you wouldn’t mind closing the door—to see you in so soon.”

“I didn’t really plan to be.” She takes in his office, working her way to sitting across from him.

It’s a damn sight tidier than the rest of the Archive, but he wouldn’t describe its state as neat. On her last visit, he doubts she focused any attention here. The corpse wasn’t in his office, no matter the amount of time Gertrude spent in while it was her own. He stops himself; if he goes down that path so early in this meeting, he’ll never be able to focus on anything  _but_  asking her about Gertrude.

“I thought about what you said,” she goes on. “You won’t find an officer out there who doesn’t have some sort of strange story, but most of the time it comes down to something banal. Right up until you’re Section 31 like I am. Even then, it’s a lot of perfectly normal incidents that just look odd on the outside and someone’s gotten spooked, but—sorry, how does this whole statement thing work?”

“It’s very straightforward.” Jon adjusts the tape recorder. “You tell your story, or stories if you so choose. Ordinarily my team would do as much follow-up as we can, though I suspect that won’t be the case here. You can go ahead.”

He hits RECORD.

Ms. Hussain gives the device a dubious look, but in place of the usual scathing remarks about the quality of the Institute’s equipment, she says, “I really shouldn’t be talking about it on tape.”

“That’s entirely up to you,” he says. “You came to us.”

“I came to you,” she echoes pointedly, “at your suggestion.”

Ah. Yes, there is that. Jon leans forward, elbows on the desk. “If you’re concerned your superiors will learn you’ve given us a statement, you needn’t be,” he says, and goes on to explain the Institute’s NDA policy. It isn’t often they mark statements for internal use only—ghost stories with any need for such a high level of discretion are infrequent enough—but the policies are stringent for a reason. There are several politicians’ tapes with the label, a handful of high profile celebrities’, and the like.

Ms. Hussain doesn’t seem entirely reassured, but she moves on nonetheless.

Jon listens attentively, smothering the inclination to interject “subordinate” when she refers to Martin as his friend; he’s being excessively uncharitable, and he knows it, but they are  _not_  friends. Her explanation of Section 31…it explains rather a lot. He makes a mental note of the officers she names, certain he recognizes a name or two from statements they’ve already been through.

It’s a distinct effort, one he hopes he conceals, to mask his eagerness when the subject turns to Gertrude’s body. Even more so at her mention of the three boxes of cassettes. His heart races—if he could only access them, there might be answers—and if Ms. Hussain hasn’t yet found time to even touch them, maybe she wouldn’t turn down outside help. Outside help with experience in the supernatural.

“I would be happy to help,” he offers as casually as he can, “if you’d like someone else to listen to them. Going through material from Gertrude’s tenure is my job, after all.”

“That would be very much against policy, Jon,” she says, but there’s a cautious note in her voice instead of a hard edge.

“Of course,” he says. “I wouldn’t want you to put your job at risk.”

“No, we wouldn’t want that.” Ms. Hussain’s eyes flick toward the tape recorder. “That thing still running?”

“I turned it off a minute ago.” He forces himself to remain calm, collected, near to disinterested detachment as he can summon.

When she’s gone, having promised him nothing but having very much implied  _something,_  Jon rifles for a new tape.

“Supplemental,” he begins, keeping a close eye on the door. His thoughts drift in directions he dislikes.

Diego Molina, mystery burn victim from statement 0121102, whose throat was cut by one Gerard Keay. Jon shifts in his seat, wondering again what sort of person this Gerard was. Suspected and acquitted of having murdered his mother; having, according to one account, stabbed a scalpel through Diego Molina’s throat (for some purported greater good or possibly something to do with a cult? what was it Ms. Saraki quoted in her statement? “Better Beholding than the Lightless Flame” may bear revisiting), hunting down Leitners—painting an eye that hung in his mother’s shop. Which his mother told Dominic Swain postmortem. Several years postmortem. An artist and a killer…who was he? It’s almost disappointing that Jon will never really know.

He’s tucking the supplemental tape into its not-exactly-hidden hiding place with the other few when the smell from this morning returns.

 _Cinnamon_ , he places, and then he’s sinking into it.

* * *

For a moment, Jon does not recall where he is. The alarm going off is not his own. It’s much gentler than the jarring screams that draw him out of bed on the rare occasion he’s properly asleep when they go off. Beside him, a warm, solid body shifts and a drowsy voice mumbles nothing in particular. The alarm goes silent.

“G’morning, Jon,” Martin says through a yawn, one hand resting light, almost tentative on his chest.

_Christ. I spent the night with Martin on our first date._

It isn’t that he minds. It just isn’t something he  _does_. But he has now, and he can’t help the stab of alarm at this uncharted territory. No, he doesn’t regret it, nor a single one of the kisses exchanged, nor anything else about the evening, but he’s not the only part of this equation, and Martin may well have some regrets of his own.

Martin sits up, stretching his arms out to his sides, and drops a smile down at him.

Or, he revises, Martin may well be as content with how their evening ended as he was.

“Morning,” he says, in a voice still rough with sleep, reaching for his own phone tucked beneath the pillow. He squints blearily at the time. “It is unconscionably early.”

“You’re right.” Martin makes a face. “Did you sleep all right?”

“Yes.” Jon is surprised to realize it’s true. “That was one of the best nights I had in a while. Of sleep, I mean.”

“Only the sleep?”

Jon’s face heats. “I didn’t want to imply—”

Martin laughs. “You’re cute when you’re embarrassed.”

Jon makes a grumpy sound, which only makes Martin laugh at him again. He doesn’t really mind.

“I’ve got to get a quick shower,” Martin says, casting a regretful look at the time. “Usually I do it at night, but I was somewhat put off my routine last night.”

“Yes, ah. Sorry about that.” Jon rubs at the back of his neck. He’s not quite sure of the proper conduct when you’ve accidentally gone to bed with someone so early on, and he doesn’t want to—get it wrong, mess anything up the way he so excels at doing.

“Don’t be sorry.” Martin leans down to kiss him and to kiss him back is an automatic thing. The kiss is the lingering sort, and Jon wants very much to pull Martin down atop him and keep him in bed as long as possible; his students never listen to him anyway, they wouldn’t be horribly distraught if he canceled. It’s not a sexual urge, but he enjoys how it feels to have Martin here, so close, and it would be nice to continue basking in the glow of him. But Martin breaks the kiss and says, “You’re welcome to stay here and go back to sleep if you want. You’re always exhausted.”

“That’s the life,” Jon says. He remains tucked beneath the covers even as Martin slips his legs over the side of the bed.

“You need a break,” Martin says, crossing his bedroom to visit the closet. Jon is content to watch him. “It’s so early in the term for you to be this worn down.”

“Early in the autumn term, yes, but I was working through the summer as well.” Less time spent teaching, significantly more of it in the library; Gerry physically dragged him out on more than one occasion, Ms. Robinson shaking her head at Jon’s cursing.

Martin shakes his head. “That might make it worse.”

“I’m not the only one who needs a break, Mr. Blackwood.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Professor Sims.”

Martin exits the room with a smile and Jon lets his eyes fall shut again. He hasn’t got to be anywhere for several hours yet. Beneath the blanket, one of his hands sweeps out toward the place Martin so recently abdicated. Still warm. His lips curl of their own accord. It really was an excellent evening. He’d gone into it hoping Martin would still like him by the time it ended; spending the night hadn’t been within the realm of possibility, but here he is, and if the kissing is anything to go off of, Martin still very much likes him.

If Jon were the poetry writing sort, he might be inclined to write one now.

Martin returns with damp hair, looking more alive than anyone should be allowed so early in the morning. He’s half-dressed, wearing an undershirt and black slacks. Still toweling off those dark curls of his—Jon wants to run his hands through them—he says, “Were you going to go home?”

Jon peeks at his phone and winces. There are, by his most cursory estimation, approximately 60,000 combined text messages awaiting him; it’s not as much an exaggeration as it might be. It hadn’t even crossed his mind last night, what Gerry and Georgie might think when he didn’t come home; he’d been someone preoccupied with a lapful of Martin, and what a pleasant preoccupation that was. “You know, I don’t think I am. Gerry and Georgie will never let me hear the end of it.”

“If it helps, I’m going to get the same thing from Michael today,” Martin says, and sighs. “Probably tomorrow, too, and I’ll have Georgie.”

Jon waves his phone a little. “It’s already begun.”

Martin grins. “That’s what you get for living with them.”

“A choice I question every day.”

“I don’t believe you.”

Jon snorts. It decides midway through it would prefer to be a yawn. “You’re sure it’s all right for me to stay here alone?”

“Sure.” Martin drapes his towel over his shoulders. “You don’t seem the robbing me blind type. You can meet me at Cosy after you’ve woken back up and showered. Unfortunately, I cannot promise you a flatmate free morning.”

“Two for the price of none,” Jon says, and shuts his eyes, attempting to get comfortable again. It’s a much greater challenge without Martin there. He listens to Martin shuffling about the room, the quiet clacking of clothes hangers and  _floomph_  of the towel dropping into a basket. Then the bed dips beside him and a gentle hand touches his chin, and Martin kisses him again.

“Tell me if I’m doing too much of that,” Martin murmurs. “I spent so much time thinking about it beforehand, I sort of can’t resist. ‘Specially as you’re in my bed.”

Jon gives in to his earlier urge, threading one hand into Martin’s hair and drawing his mouth back down.

Martin departs for Cosy several minutes later, his hair nicely tousled, and Jon is content to drift back to sleep a while.

* * *

Jon’s office comes back to him in the same slow, languid dissipation of the mirror’s world as always. Smell and sight and sound. He just stops himself from swearing, his hands fisting at his sides. The very last thing he’s interested in seeing, or certainly very near the top of the list, is the wrong Jonathan Sims in bed with his Martin Blackwood. It’s not a level of intimacy he’s any interest in sharing with Martin, even one removed from him by whatever distance separates universes. (It might not be much distance at all; he’s given it a little thought as of late.)

Now he knows what it is to have Martin pressed close to him; he’s felt Martin’s mouth.

As though he’s heard his name crossing Jon’s mind, Martin chooses then to nudge the office door open. He is, predictably, carrying a tea tray.

“Morning,” he says, an odd, high note to his voice. His eyes stay fixed on the tray as he crosses the room. He’s liable to trip over something at this rate. Jon bites back an irritated remark. “I would have brought this sooner, but I didn’t want to interrupt your meeting. Did she have any news about Gertrude?”

“No.” Jon has no intention of disclosing his new role, such as it is, in Gertrude’s case. “She came to make a statement.”

“Oh?” There’s interest there, but Martin’s still not looking at him. “That sounds interesting.”

Jon makes a noncommittal sound. He watches Martin set the tea in front of him and begin to straighten up several stacks of paperwork. Martin doesn’t seem to notice his watching. “We won’t be doing any follow-up, there’s no point, but I have got addendums for several case files we’ve already been through.” He pinches the bridge of his nose. “ _Martin._ ”

Martin practically jumps. He looks nervous and—good lord, is that a hint of pink in his cheeks? Is Martin  _blushing_? He hasn’t got the time, nor the energy for this.

“Thank you for the tea, Martin.” Jon forces his voice to remain level.  _It’s not Martin’s fault,_  he reminds himself. “Is there something else you need?”

“Oh,” Martin says again, more softly. “I sort of wondered if you had seen—it’s just, the mirror? I just wondered what you’ve…seen lately.”

“I’m aware of the.” Jon gropes half-blind for the right word. “Progression.”

Their first date, and they’ve spent the night together. No. They’re nothing like each other. He and the other Jon are  _not_  the same man.

“Right. Me too.” Martin sounds a combination of bolstered and cowed by this; by Jon not shutting the conversation down immediately, by something he’s seen himself, perhaps? “I saw their date.”

Jon waits for Martin to come to the point; it takes the majority of his willpower not to snap at him to spit it out. He reaches instead for his notebook. He may as well begin noting his latest experience. He still feels Martin’s hand on his chest; the empty page laughs at him.

“I wondered,” the Martin in front of him goes on eventually, squaring his shoulders so thoroughly Jon cannot help a frisson of alarm, “if you’d like to maybe go for a coffee sometime.”

“No.” The word is out, firm and curt, before Jon has thought it. Well. It’s nice to know his mind isn’t being completely overrun by the influence of the other’s. Evidently the same cannot be said for Martin. That’s…concerning.

“Okay.” Martin is already turning to go.

Jon should let him. He really should. However, irritating and often incompetent as he finds the Martin of his own world, he doesn’t hate him, doesn’t see sense in lashing out or being cruel, and Martin is listening to the feelings of a man he is not, and retreating the way he is, Martin reminds him of a kicked puppy. He says, “Martin.”

Martin stops. If he was bolstered a minute ago, he’s not now, his shoulders hunched as though he might be able to make himself shorter.

“Martin, look at me.”

Martin turns.

Jon chooses not to interpret the look on his face, and allows himself to sound gentler in saying, “They’re not us, Martin. I’m not that Jon, and you’re not that Martin, and you’re not asking me to coffee because it’s what you want. It’s what he wants.”

“Right.” There’s a brittleness there that nearly makes Jon feel guilty. But he’s only being honest. He’s only trying to help Martin keep a firm hold on himself. “’Course I don’t want to—you know, I’ll just go, then, there’s a lot to do, and you know where to find me if you need anything.”

Jon doesn’t stop him this time. He waits for the door to  _click_  shut before releasing a long, weary breath. He shoves aside a pang of envy for the wrong Jon’s night of sleep in his Martin’s company, and sets to writing.


	13. a person can grow used to

Martin could kick himself. He shouldn’t have said anything. Now Jon knows—what? That he’s an idiot? He’d already thought that much. Jon has never been subtle about not particularly liking him, about not having wanted him for Archival staff. And Jon is completely right.

_I_ _'m not that Jon, and you’re not that Martin._

For starters, the other Martin is better. Talented at both poetry and drinks, while he himself is serviceable at best in both regards. (All right, maybe more than serviceable where tea and coffee are concerned.) Also, the other Jon has liked his Martin from the start, as far as he can tell. Never thought less of him, not that he can blame this Jon for doing so.

“Hey,” Tim says, surveying an unreasonable mound of files they haven’t gotten around to disturbing, not least for fear it might collapse if they touch it incorrectly, much like a late-stage game of Jenga threatening to come tumbling down, “don’t let Jon get to you.”

Martin winces. Is he really as transparent as that? He’d thought he was hiding his disappointment well enough. Hiding his hurt feelings isn’t exactly new territory; he’d had plenty experience there long before Jon. “How’d you know?”

“You were just in there.” Tim hovers a hand over a collection of statements near the mound’s top, bound together with twine—really, what was Gertrude  _doing_  down here?—and before Martin can ask if he thinks this is really a good idea, he’s started to extricate it, careful, like he’s working a wild animal free of a trap. It comes loose—the mound shifts ominously—Martin braces for the imminent avalanche—and the mound steadies itself. Martin imagines he hears a sigh of relief, and Tim grins an entirely too pleased with himself grin. “And he’s Jon.”

Martin ponders this for a moment before acknowledging that, “Yeah, okay, that’s fair.”

“I know he’s been exceptionally prickly lately,” Tim continues, carrying his newly won statements away to his desk, complete with a rude, smug gesture toward the mound, “but you’re better off ignoring him.”

“I know,” Martin says, and he does know. He’s spent this long ignoring the way Jon treats him, the constant double-checking second-guessing of his work though he never does the same to Sasha or Tim. He’s asked his heart—multiple times!—if it’s sure it wouldn’t like to make better choices and it’s set itself on Jon, and that’s what really bothers him:  _You’re not asking me because it’s what you want._

But it is what he wants. It’s what he’s wanted since they were both just ordinary members of the research team, only he’s never had the nerve to ask, and now Jon thinks the entire reason he’s asking is the  _other_  Martin, that it’s a false crush. How’s he supposed to explain, to really make Jon  _believe_  that the other Martin hasn’t felt anything for Jon he hasn’t already felt himself? Not in an emotional sense, at least. It had been nearly impossible to make eye contact today when his thoughts insisted on flitting back to Martin on Jon’s lap, the way it had felt.

The only comfort—and a cold, slim comfort it is—is that his feelings for Jon haven’t always been as desperately obvious as he sometimes worries they might be.

So, yeah, Martin knows he should ignore Jon. But it’s difficult to ignore Jon when he’s constantly having another, far more amenable Jon shown to him. He doesn’t even  _want_  that one. He wants the prickly one shut away in his office.

_Well, you couldn't_ _have him before and you can’t have him now, so that hasn’t changed. Buck up, Martin._

He drops into his chair to weigh up whether he’d rather work on Institute business or attempt to cover some ground with the mirror. (The mirror is, technically, Institute business, he supposes.) He’s still undecided when he hears the low roar of more voices than have ever been in the Archive at once.

_Figures._

* * *

“Jon’s here earlier than usual.”

Martin pretends he hasn’t heard Georgie. He’s standing at the till, ringing up a chai latte and cinnamon bread, and it’s much easier to ignore her when he has such a valid excuse as the line still stretching to the door. Georgie is presently loading up the display, as they’re already running low on Michael’s banana bread muffins today; evidently, word has spread.

Across the café, Jon sits alone at a table, drinking his raspberry and hazelnut while looking everywhere except toward the counter. Martin doesn’t take that personally; he’s almost positive it’s Georgie’s eye Jon is avoiding, not his.

There’s been no real time for conversation this morning—there never is, first thing—but it hasn’t stopped Georgie from trying.

Martin doesn’t fault her for it. If one of his closest friends spent the night on a first date he’d want to know everything as well, but he thinks it’s Jon’s place to tell her. He’s little idea how much Jon wants her to know; he’d been somewhat too distracted with kissing him this morning to ask.

“So.” Michael takes Martin’s place at the till, allowing him to sidle away to fix drinks. “How did it go last night? Good morning, what can I get for you?”

It is his place to tell Michael, and he will, but there’s Georgie, so he says a simple, “It was nice,” and carries on with the task at hand.

Georgie, having finished with the display, pushes herself straight and maneuvers around him to work on another coffee. “It must have been.”

He worries for a moment she’ll comment on Jon not coming home, but she says nothing more, only throws another pining look toward Jon’s corner. If they weren’t as overrun as they are every morning, Martin would give her permission to pop over there for a moment, just long enough to harangue him, but he genuinely cannot spare her at the moment; he’s already forgotten how they made do without her before.

“Good morning,” says Tim’s boisterous voice, “if it isn’t my favorite Cosy employee here to greet me. Be honest now, you saw me in line and made Martin move?”

Having seen the group in line himself, Martin has already fixed their drinks; regulars, particularly with regular habits, are a blessing for multiple reasons. He twists the cups in front of him till he finds the correct three.

“Have you ever considered turning it off for a morning?” Melanie’s voice follows.

“I don’t see why I’d want to do that,” Tim says.

“You’re exhausting,” Sasha says, complete with a yawn that sounds not entirely faked.

“I haven’t heard Michael complaining.”

“It’s bad form to complain in front of the customers,” Michael says, and Tim makes an affronted sound.

“You know I only have the two employees,” Martin says as he hands Sasha her tea, which she takes gratefully, and raises to him.

“I know.” Tim gives Georgie a look that might be described as apologetic if not for the devilish smile he’s still cutting toward Michael, who in turn is pretending he hasn’t caught on. “Sorry, Georgie, you’re great and all, but I’m fonder of Michael.”

“That’s all right,” Georgie says cheerfully, handing him his drink from among the trio. “I’m fonder of Michael than I am you.”

“You have excellent judgment,” Melanie says, and breaks off a piece of her newly acquired banana bread muffin to pop into her mouth. “Also, I prefer you to Michael, though his pastries have you all soundly thrashed.”

“This is all lovely,” Michael says, the color in his cheeks noticeable, “but there’s a very long queue formed here.”

“You’re not trying to get rid of me, are you?” Tim sounds exaggeratedly put-out.

Michael smiles wordlessly at him before turning to the next customer.

“You haven’t actually taken him on a date yet,” Sasha reminds him.

“Good point.” Tim raises his voice. “Michael!”

“Busy,” Michael calls cheerily. “You’ll have to go to the end of the queue and work your way back if you need me.”

Tim pouts. He says, more quietly, considering, “What do you suppose he’d do if I said I just wanted him?”

“Probably faint on the spot,” Martin says, alarmed by the thought, “so please don’t.”

“Righto.” Tim gives a decisive nod. “I’ll wait until things quiet down a bit.”

“Come on, idiot.”

“They’re a fun bunch,” Georgie observes as Melanie and Sasha drag the protesting Tim away.

“They’re certainly something,” Martin says, and returns to business. It’s easy to lose track of time when Cosy’s busy as it is, but he doesn’t think it’s long after the trio have gone to sit that Gerry arrives.

Martin happens to be looking at the door at the time. His eyes were on Jon a moment earlier, watching his fingers drum on the table, his expression pensive and far away, and he’d wondered what was on the man’s mind. Probably not him, with that sort of face. Maybe his thesis? When Gerry comes into the café, hair falling over his eyes, he scans the room, his eyes landing on Jon quick enough. A slow smirk spreads over his face, but he joins the line; Martin isn’t sure he wants to know.

It takes some time for the three of them to work their way through the legion of customers ahead of Gerry, but he does reach them, and Martin has his standard fare ready and waiting.

“Cheers, Martin,” Gerry says, the smirk still very much in place. “I hope our Jon took good care of you last night.”

Martin’s face warms.

“He won’t tell me anything,” Georgie says, only slightly petulant.

“Georgie,” Martin says pleasantly.

“Right, right, I’ll get it all from Jon later.” Georgie waves him off like he’s the one pestering _her_ , and strolls off toward Michael.

“I suppose you’re going to push for details now,” he says to Gerry. “I’ve been facing down Georgie’s eyebrows all morning.”

“Nah, I wouldn’t dream of it.” Gerry indicates Jon. “He’ll tell me what he wants to. But I am assuming it went well. Else you left him heartbroken and he went to drink it off in a gutter somewhere, which makes it odd he’s here this morning.”

Martin laughs and feels Georgie’s eyes burning into his back like he’s betraying her in some way. “No, he was with me.”

“Good, glad to hear it.” The painter’s face, which is in fact speckled with a variety of colors at the moment, goes somberer. “Listen, Martin, about Jon? He’s a good guy, one of the best I know, or I wouldn’t have been friends with him as long as I have, but he’s not the best at…hm, how do I put this?”

“Human interaction?” Martin offers. He’s gathered as much in the time they’ve known each other so far.

“Yeah, that’s it. He tries his best,” Gerry continues, an intensity in his eyes, “but he can get standoffish and caught up in his work to the point he forgets to eat, and sometimes people call him aloof, and I don’t know if they’re completely in the wrong there, but he does  _try_.”

“All right,” Martin says, unsure how he’s meant to be responding to any of this.

“Sorry, I’m not very good at this? It doesn’t really come up.” Gerry lets out a breath. “I hope the two of you’ll be good together. He and Georgie did go out for a bit, if they haven’t mentioned, it was years back and it ended badly. I’d like to see this one go a little better for everyone involved.”

Martin feels nearly sheepish. “I feel like I’m being sat down by a parent.”

“Yeah, well.” Gerry shrugs. “Ask him, I’m the only family he’s got left. I’m also happy to fill in for sibling, cousin, or wine aunt.” He ticks the roles off on his fingers.

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Martin says. “We’re sure to have need of a wine aunt at some point, and I haven’t got one of my own.”

Just his mum, who hasn’t spoken to him in months. He’d skimmed his email hopefully this morning, after finally giving in and opening the e-mail from the poetry journal (an acceptance) and been no more disappointed than usual to find nothing from her, though he writes every week.

“All this to say,” Gerry says, helpfully tugging him from that line of thought, “I’ll still take your side when he ruins everything. I’d hate to lose access to the coffee.”

“Let’s hope that doesn’t happen.” Martin gives him a smile. It’s difficult to imagine the Jon he spent such a pleasant evening with ruining anything. “If it does, you’ll still be welcome here.”

Gerry slips away toward Jon’s table, and Martin watches him go before returning his focus to the creation of several more drinks. He doesn’t believe it for a second, that Gerry would take his side if it did come to something so ridiculous as taking sides. He’s seen them interact enough since opening up shop to know the man loves Jon very much.

Work sweeps him up then, and he fully loses track of the time again. The next thing he’s aware of is Jon stood across the counter, looking at him with another expression he can’t fully parse, but he likes the way it feels.

“Hey,” he says.

“Hey, yourself.” Jon’s got both hands stuffed into his pockets. He brings one out, something small and silver clutched in his fingers. “I’ve got to go, but I thought I should return this for now.”

Martin accepts the proffered key, tempting as it is to tell Jon he’s welcome to hold onto it a while, and slips it into his own pocket. “Good luck in class today. I hope a few of them are attentive.”

“I won’t count on it,” Jon says, and begins to step away, but hesitates. “I’ll see you later?”

“I really hope so.” Martin reaches into the display for an extra strawberry-graham scone, the sight of which brightens Jon’s face enough to keep Martin on air for the rest of the day. After handing it over, he indicates the café around them. “You know where to find me. I won’t say no to some after-hours company. We also have a delicious lunch menu, as I think you’re aware.”

Oh, he hopes that didn’t come off as too eager, or pushy.

Jon nods and throws a look over his shoulder toward Gerry, who catches him do so and taps at his wrist. He leans in a bit, his voice soft and more than a little embarrassed, “I’m not going to kiss you while you’re working, but I have been thinking of it.”

“I heard that,” Georgie sing-songs from the till.

“No you didn’t,” Jon says more loudly. “You saw my mouth moving and you’re hoping I’ll start blushing.”

“Is it working?” The customer in front of Georgie laughs.

“No.”

“Pity.”

Martin thinks he might be, himself. He tucks a wayward curl behind his ear and says, “You know what time we close, if you’d like to kiss me when I’m not working.”

Jon’s mouth curls and Martin’s stomach does goes newborn foal ungainly. He watches Jon till he’s gone from sight; how’s he meant to focus for the rest of the day now, with the promise of Jon’s lips on his own tonight? Probably he shouldn’t allow a repeat of last night, though, for sanitary, health inspectorial reasons.

He makes an entire drink on autopilot, his thoughts far away, before Michael says, “I saw that key exchange. It must have gone  _very_  well.”

“Oh, shut up.” Martin considers tossing the nearest available pastry at him, decides it not worth the loss of sale, then grins. “It really did.”

* * *

Martin is content—though content’s not really the word for it—to wait for the Archive to settle back into proper order around him. Sight is the first thing this time, the clutter of his desk, followed by the tune Tim has begun to whistle (Loch Lomond, he thinks) and Sasha muttering, and then the smell. Funny how his senses never really come back in the same order as they left. Maybe there’s something to that, or maybe it means nothing at all. Maybe none of it means anything, and the mirror’s just out to see him squirm.

This entire situation is—it’s not what he needs, it’s not helping anything. He  _likes_  it, at least parts of it, and he’s no doubts as to how healthy that is. Letting himself get absorbed in watching his counterpart’s life certainly isn’t a  _beneficial_  coping mechanism, but what else is he supposed to do.

 _You couldn’t have him before and you can’t have him now,_ he thinks again.  _You’ll just also have to live with…dating Jon, sort of._

It’s not going to do anything for him to sit here and reflect (oh, haha, very funny Martin, how clever) on any of this for the day, so he takes a breath and jots the experience into his notebook. At least there’s nothing too embarrassing to put down this time. When he’s finished with it, he skims his list of what else needs done. There’s no end to it.

Holloway’s Giving & Grace, the charity shop, is written in a corner with a star beside it, and it  _has_  been a while since he attempted to reach out to them. The owner is back in by now, surely? It’s worth another try, before he settles in with proper Institute business. The only reason the mirror  _isn’t_  proper Institute business, the reason it’s not gone to the researchers, is he and Jon haven’t wanted it to.

He shuffles notes around while the phone rings, searching for the page from his first call to the charity shop. Has it even been two weeks? Will the owner have returned or is he wasting his time? Probably wasting his time either way, but—

“Holloway’s Giving & Grace, you’ve reached Gretchen. How can I help you?”

“Hi Gretchen,” he says, “I’m not sure if you remember, but my name’s Martin, I called in once before to ask about a mirror I bought there?”

“Right, yes, I do remember, you wanted to know where it came from, didn’t you? Caitlin is—just a moment, dear,” Gretchen says, and then through a burst of static he hears her say, “Caitlin, if you’ve got time there’s a call.” A pause, and then, “Here, Martin.”

There’s the sound of the phone being handed off, and then a soft-spoken woman says, “This is Caitlin.”

Martin explains himself over again, drumming his fingers on his notes. Nothing is going to come of this, he already knows, but maybe,  _maybe_  he’ll get lucky and Caitlin Holloway will be the best record keeper they’ve ever called up for a charity shop.

Caitlin says, “You know, I do remember that mirror coming in. It was so pretty I nearly kept it myself.”

His heart leaps into his throat. “Did you?”

“Yes, but that’s not the sort of habit I’ve gotten into, running this place, you don’t stay open by keeping the inventory, and I remember it felt sort of—this might sound silly, but it felt tired, the way old items sometimes do, and I had the feeling it was looking for something I couldn’t give it. Now, let me see here…” There’s the sound of several long keystrokes and then a sympathetic, “I’m sorry, it looks like it came in as part of a miscellaneous collection. The donor didn’t leave us a name.”

 _Blast._  “You wouldn’t remember anything about the donor, would you?” he asks, a tad desperately.

Caitlin makes a thoughtful sound. “Only that it was a man, seemed keen to be rid of the collection. Is it important?”

“No,” Martin says; he hadn’t been relying on this line of investigation, had already known better, but it really would have made his life easier. Suppose they can’t have that, just  _something_  being easy for once,  _anything_  at all going well. “I don’t know, maybe. Do you think you could call me back if you remember anything else?”

“I suppose I could,” Caitlin says, sounding reasonably baffled.

Martin rattles off the Institute’s number, and says, “Thank you for your help, Caitlin. I’ll let you get back to your day.”

She wishes him well and he returns the phone to the receiver, puffing out a breath. Well. That was completely useless.

Martin glances up at a light  _thumping_  sound, and finds Sasha scowling at her computer. “Giving you trouble again?”

“I can’t get into the database I usually use,” she says.

“Odd, how much that’s been happening lately.” Tim quirks an eyebrow. “You’re meant to be our computer genius.”

“I know that, I  _don’t_  know what the problem lately is,” Sasha complains.

“Maybe you need a new computer,” Martin suggests, and picks up his buzzing phone. The screen indicates a new message from Lee.

 _You_   _’re in Chelsea, right?_

He blinks.  _Yeah, are you?_

Okay, there is one thing going well. It’s not easy, as such, given his settled in feelings for Jon and the potentially burgeoning feelings for—he does  _like_  Lee. It could go somewhere. Maybe. It’s been a long time since Martin, through his pining, has genuinely allowed himself to consider anything ‘happening’ with someone aside from Jon. And Jon’s turned him down only ten minutes ago, and it doesn’t matter what the other Jon feels for his Martin, because Jon—this Jon—is  _right_.

They aren’t the same.

_I'll_ _be in the area later. Lunch?_

Martin doesn’t hesitate.  _Yes, please. Tell me where._

* * *

Over the next week, one man named Jonathan Sims pieces together a plan of action for presenting to his adviser while spending his evenings seated across Martin Blackwood in a low-lit café; Martin offers him tea and food, which hasn’t changed, and Martin offers him kisses, which has. They haven’t the time for another proper date, and it rankles him, but Martin sits on his lap and winds arms around his neck, and he doesn’t mind that at all.

Another man by the same name sees this once, twice, three times.

On the third occasion he has the fleeting thought that fairy tales tend toward threes and he puts it aside. Once, he types a message to Georgina Barker and deletes it again; twice, he looks at Martin Blackwood seated at his desk and remembers how those lips feel against his own, and he wrenches himself back into place. Jon has never had any interest in kissing Martin and it’s not changing now, and it’s not  _those_  lips he’s remembering.

He’s just coming free of watching Gerard Keay and Georgina Barker tease the other Jon about his newly budding romance when Ms. Hussain visits the Archive again. His assistants are out to lunch (Martin had looked more cheerful than usual on his way out, he couldn’t help noticing), and when she questions if he’s all right he tells her he just hasn’t gotten much sleep as of late, which isn’t a lie, and he still tastes a splash of raspberry hazelnut on his tongue when she slips him a tape.

In the same frame of time—though it’s also not the same, as the mirror tends to veer toward ‘wildly inconsistent’ in its ability to keep them lined up—one man named Martin Blackwood jots down lines of poetry between fixing drinks and runs as many interviews as he can feasibly schedule. He considers, more than once and especially when he’s on Jon’s lap with a tongue teasing into his mouth, asking if Jon would like to come and spend the night again, but he thinks they ought to at least have one more real date before he extends that invitation.

Another man with the same face sees and does not count.

He takes up his notebook with growing resignation. He reads through the book on folk songs and it contributes little except to make him think it’s time to change tactics for a while and that Lee Kipple might like to see it. Martin sees Lee twice, for their first impromptu lunch and then a second, both spent in a pub where the shadows make him think of leaning in. They spend a lot of time texting, and Martin isn’t sure whether to classify it as friendly or flirtatious.

(He feels a spike of guilt for considering the second, only it’s himself he’s betraying, if anybody. Jon’s not interested, and being in love with him…he is that, nothing to be done about it.)

He watches the other Martin laugh with Michael Shelley and comes back to his lonely flat, not so quiet as it could be with more of Lee’s musical recommendations singing out of his laptop speakers.

Martin Blackwood and Jonathan Sims steal what time they can together; Jonathan Sims and Martin Blackwood speak no more than is professionally required.

It’s amazing, the things a person can grow used to.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey word processor, you can't stop me from using inspectorial in a sentence, you're not the boss of me.


	14. looking for a paper clip

Somebody has been through Jon’s desk.

That may be overstating things. The desk is hardly ransacked: the mass of paperwork sat atop it is undisturbed, Jane Prentiss’s ashes unmoved from where he left them, nothing missing as far as his notice goes—but the drawer in which he stows his supplemental recordings is ajar, and he knows he did not leave it so last night. He runs one finger along the few tapes, surrounded by a jumble of extra blank cassettes, counting over them. All present and accounted for, his own and Gertrude’s. Still, he frowns; he did  _not_  leave it this way, and so someone else has been in his desk.

It might have been completely innocent. Maybe they had need of a stapler or a paper clip or a fresh tape and his desk was the first place they thought to look. His assistants had gone home before him yesterday, but Tim arrived to the Archive first this morning, and maybe he just needed—something. Jon flounders for a decent explanation that doesn’t pull his stomach tight.

It was  _probably_  perfectly innocent.

His hand lingers over Gertrude’s tape. He hasn’t listened to it just yet, conflicted over whether or not he should do so with his assistants present. If he tells them he’s recording they’ll leave him alone well enough, but if one of them were to interrupt for any reason—

Jon sighs at himself. If one of them were to come in, he might say he found the tape somewhere in the Archive; it’s hardly out of the realm of possibility, the state of the place. There may  _actually_  be a dozen tapes belonging to the previous Head Archivist lost among the boxes and his team just hasn’t run across them yet. He hasn’t the faintest what to expect from this tape. Ms. Hussain made it clear she hadn’t listened to it herself, had no idea if it was relevant to the case or if it was just an unimportant, meaningless statement like so many they’ve got here. But Gertrude had not only taken the time to not only record the contents of this tape, she’d taken it into the tunnels with her. Assuming, of course, she did die in the tunnels, that she and the tapes weren’t moved after the fact.

Jon scrubs a hand the beginnings of stubble he hadn’t bothered to shave this morning after the mirror decided to abscond with him for the sake of his counterpart staring, for what felt like several hours, at the glow of his laptop screen. He’d been too busy to shave, writing down that waste of paper, pressing so hard he’d nearly torn through the page in several places.

There are too many questions he hasn’t got the answers to right now. If they had CCTV in the Archive, this would all be easier, the police may have already made an arrest, and he might be able to rest easy, knowing whatever fate met Gertrude isn’t coming for him as well.

“Jon?” Sasha says first, and raps at the door frame second. Her hair is combed neatly as ever, her shirt pressed, and he’s more conscious than before of the rumpled state of his own shirt, which he’d had every intention of putting away after doing his laundry, and it had just sort of gotten away from him.

He pretends he hasn’t been staring directly into the drawer for five minutes and gives her a smile, or his best approximation of one. “Do you need something?”

“No,” she says, pulling a hand through her bob. “Is everything all right?”

“Of course.” Jon stiffens. “Why wouldn’t it be?”

“You’ve been standing there for a while.” Sasha shrugs. “I almost wondered if you’d fallen asleep like that.”

Jon forces himself to sit, the motions purely mechanical, and slides the desk drawer shut. “Lost in thought, that’s all. Would you mind closing the door? I’ve got a lot to do and would prefer not to be disturbed. You might let Martin and Tim know.”

“Yes,” Sasha says, and lingers a moment, her eyes never leaving him until she does shut the door. How odd. Was Sasha the one rifling through his desk? Stopping by to see if he’s noticed anything amiss?

In a moment of panic, he opens the drawer a second time, counts over tapes a second time, and releases a breath. They’re all there. He knew they were all there. And there’s nothing else in his desk worth locating. He frees Gertrude’s tape—he may as well get this out of the way or he’ll spend the rest of the day wondering what’s on it—and slides it into the player.

_What were they looking for if not a tape?_

“A paper clip, Jon,” he mutters, knowing full well they’ve an entire jarful of paper clips shared among them in the Archive proper. But there’s nothing el—he stills.

There’s nothing else here  _now_. But the mirror was here before. Martin won’t have been looking for it here, he knows it’s in a storage unit somewhere, and maybe nobody was looking for it at all, but if it had  _been_  here, if somebody else got a hand on it and started seeing their own counterpart…that’s the last thing they’d need. It’s for the best he moved it, no matter how badly he sometimes itches to have his hands on it again.

Jon knits his fingers together and leans his forehead against them. This, anyone getting into his desk, is only a complication if he allows it to be. But he doesn’t want one of them taking an ‘extra’ tape and popping it in, recording over his investigative recordings, or worse: listening to them. He lifts his eyes and casts about the office; there aren’t the most ideal hiding places here. Stowing them in one of the many boxes of files would run the same risks as keeping them in his desk; it might be worse, in fact, as the tapes being all together in a box would be more noticeable than having them in his desk. If he took them home and something happened to him, if he wound up like Gertrude, his successor would never find them, would have to start ground—tunnels, he thinks with dark amusement—up.

His gaze comes to rest on the floor. It’ll have to be that, then. He can prise up a floorboard later, when the Archive is empty and he hasn’t got to worry about his assistants coming to investigate. For the moment he picks Gertrude’s tape from the drawer and takes a breath. No time like the present.

His finger stops on the PLAY button, his office gone wrong about him, larger and less a disaster and much more a hallway, bright and then smelling of something that makes his stomach growl and some flowery, over-applied perfume, and he lets his hand fall limp, and then his office isn’t there at all.

* * *

The building is always at its most crowded on Friday afternoons. Jon is usually too busy being locked away in his broom closet to pay it any real mind, aside from scowling at his door when study groups or students waiting outside nearby offices grow too loud to be tolerable, and he’s not pleased to be walking through it now. He’s just wrapped up his office hours for the week with a student worried over an upcoming paper; her score on the Shakespeare assignment was less than desirable, and he’s promised to help her make extensive use of the university’s tutoring resources for this assignment. Too few of his students ever bother to take advantage of his offered desk time, both a blessing and a curse; by all accounts, they prefer not to spend more time with him than necessary, and while the feeling is thoroughly mutual, putting up with him might be beneficial to their grades.

Speaking of the desirability of things—the entire reason he’s left his office, carved out time in his Friday afternoon that he should be using for research, is a short-notice lunch date with Martin. His phone had rung shortly before the period blocked out for students, and he’d have ignored it if it were any other name on the screen. It had been easy to picture Martin with the phone pressed close to his ear, looking about to make sure Georgie wasn’t eavesdropping, and Martin had said, “I’m sorry to ask so late, but do you have time to get lunch today?”

He’d looked at his own to do list and said, “Not really. Do you?”

“Not really. Meet me outside Cosy?”  _So we don’t get stuck inside with Michael and Georgie for twenty minutes neither of us has_  was left implied.

“I’ll see you at 1:30 then?” Jon had offered, and there had been a pause, Martin obviously considering if he could make the time work, and then a grateful, “I can’t wait.”

Jon knows ‘I can’t wait’ is just a figure of speech, that he’s said it a thousand times himself, both for things he was only mildly interested in doing and things he truly couldn’t wait for, and this is more of the latter. It’s ridiculous. He sees Martin every morning and often in the evenings now, though there’s never enough time, and he checks his watch as he shoves back an urge to do more literal shoving.

“Jon?” somebody says, and he wants to pretend he hasn’t heard, but the voice is directly at his elbow and also belongs to Dr. Bouchard, who he hasn’t spoken to since their last meeting, and so he gives in to looking at his adviser. “Are you in a hurry?”

“I am, actually.” Jon wants to look at his watch again, but refrains. It’s not 1:30 yet, he’s on his way somewhat early, he’s got the time to get to Cosy. “I’ve got a date.”

“Have you?” Dr. Bouchard looks surprised for a moment, and Jon might be offended if he hadn’t been chronically single for so long, nearly the entire time they’ve known each other. Something else he can’t place passes over Dr. Bouchard’s face, and then he’s getting a smile. “I’m glad to hear you’re taking some time for yourself. I won’t keep you. But I will see you later?”

“Yes, of course.” Jon’s smile is held up primarily by willpower, along with a dusting of reference matter and Dr. Bouchard’s confidence in him.

“Good. Go on, don’t be late on my account.”

Jon leaves him there, dodging between students and professors alike on his way into the afternoon sunshine. It’s meant to rain today, and he doesn’t trust the sky not to darken and open before he’s reached his destination, but the city is still dry by the time he spots Martin leaning against his own storefront, chatting with a dark-skinned woman. Jon slows, and for a moment, just looks from afar.

It’s not the first time he’s done so. He used to cast furtive looks in Martin’s direction every morning, hoping to go unnoticed and hardly knowing why he was doing so. Sometimes he would look for longer, the way he does now, absorbing Martin’s smile and the way it lights his entire rounded face, the way his throat moves when he laughs, the way he drags his hand through dark, bouncy curls, and when he looks now, he finds himself unable to work through the fact that this man is his. Even if it doesn’t last, if he fucks it all up later on, Martin Blackwood will always have been his for a little while, and the fact of it boggles his mind.

Martin glances away from the woman. His eyes meet Jon’s, his smile stretching broader, and his hand lifts into the air, fingers wiggling in greeting. He calls, “What are you standing over there for?”

_Admiring the view._

Jon closes the distance and says, “I didn’t want to interrupt.”

“You’re not interrupting,” Martin promises, solving Jon’s uncertainty of what to do with his hands by slotting theirs together.

“No, that would be me,” the woman says, and Jon takes the time to properly look at her. She’s an inch or so taller than he is, her hair covered by a headscarf, and her eyes a pleasant shade of hazel. He’d be remiss not to note the police uniform. “You must be Jon.”

Martin shrugs at the lifting of his eyebrows. “I might have mentioned you.”

“I asked what he was doing outside.” She takes a look over her shoulder, into Cosy. Must be waiting on somebody. “He said he had a date. I’m Basira, by the way.”

“It’s nice to meet you,” Jon says, entirely too aware of Martin’s fingers curled around his own. “Do you come here often?”

“Just discovered it this week.” Basira shakes her head and amends, “Daisy discovered it for us.”

The door opens behind them and the smell of cinnamon and apples washes into the London air. Another woman appears, several inches taller than Basira and more visibly sturdy, with red-brown hair pulled into a messy bun; she carries a cup in each hand and a paper bag under her arm. A patch of ink peeks out from beneath her collar, the bulk of it hidden so Jon can’t tell what the shape might be.

“And here she is,” Basira says, accepting one of the cups with a grateful smile.

The new woman, evidently Daisy, gives Jon a curious look. “You ready to go, Basira?”

“Sure—you two have a nice lunch.”

The pair of women walk down the street, and Jon follows their progress till they’ve rounded a corner, at which point he becomes far more interested in Martin leaning on his arm and saying, “There’s a good Indian place a few blocks down, unless you have something else in mind. I’m open to suggestions.”

“Indian’s fine,” Jon says. “It’s never a poor time for naan.”

Martin laughs a little and tugs him the opposite direction from the police officers. “How’s your day been?”

“Well, the bad part is scheduled for later.” He glances at the sky, which has decided on now to begin darkening, and regrets not having an umbrella on hand. They’ve got plenty in the flat, Gerry having a habit of coming home with a new one every time it begins to rain while he’s out without one, but Jon rarely thinks to check the weather.

“You’re scheduling your bad parts of the day now? I didn’t know that was an option, or I’d have been doing it all along.”

“I have a meeting,” he explains, and Martin allows him to gripe about just barely knowing what he’s doing until they’ve reached a hole-in-the-wall Indian restaurant.

Once they’re seated and eyeballing menus, Martin says, “Is it all right if I ask a question?

“Aside from the one you just asked?” Jon says, and Martin gives him a wry smile. He waves him on. “Ask away.”

Martin lays his menu down and looks at him thoughtfully. “Why are you doing this when it stresses you out so much? I don’t think you enjoy teaching very much, so is there something else you want to do with it?”

Jon blinks at him. He nearly laughs; he thinks, on a very specific level, Martin has seen right through him. He can’t stand teaching, and his doctorate will do little for him outside of academia, but he enjoys academia itself, usually, and this path allows him to dedicate himself wholly to the search.

“I’m searching for something,” he says, resting his cheek against one fist.

He doesn’t expound, won’t say what he’s searching for. Magic. Fairy tales. The silver-dew land of Fairy. Martin hadn’t laughed at him when he revealed his area of expertise, and it’s fully possible Martin would not laugh at him for this. That Martin would understand, smile at him, tell him it’s something beautiful. But it’s possible Martin  _would_  laugh at him, and then Jon would be unable to continue this relationship, and he’s not sure he could stand that. There’s a reason he hasn’t confided in anybody aside from Gerry, not even Georgie.

“It is stressful,” he allows, “but I do think it’s worth it. The café stresses you out at times, doesn’t it?”

“All right,” Martin says, “I suppose that’s fair.”

A short, cheerful woman bustles over to take their orders; true to his word, Jon settles on naan, as well as biryani, while Martin orders a plate of tandoori chicken.

“Enough of my day,” Jon says, “tell me about yours.”

Martin’s face brightens. “It’s been good. I told you I was working on bringing in more help, and I’ve had a few really good interviews. I have one more scheduled, but starting next week you’ll be seeing some new faces around.”

“Oh?” Jon smiles back at him. “So you might be able to make more time?”

“I might.” Martin leans toward him. “Is there something I’ll be needing more time for?”

“It’s possible.” Jon’s eyes are drawn to Martin’s mouth. He hasn’t had a kiss so far today; it’s not exactly the sort of thing they make time for during the morning rush. Martin is a truly excellent kisser; Jon can’t be faulted for having grown somewhat addicted, early in the relationship or not. “If somebody said they’d like to take you to dinner this weekend…”

“It might depend,” Martin says. “Could you describe them for me? Do you think they’re my type?”

“I really hope so,” Jon says, and Martin laughs, and he wants to drag him across the table, but he hasn’t got the nerve for it. “Maybe we should have skipped lunch.”

“Sorry?” Martin’s smile goes somewhat baffled.

“I didn’t mean to say that aloud.”

“Well, you have. I don’t think either of us have the time for more than lunch just now.”

Jon finds an interesting patch of table to focus his attention on. “I’d rather be kissing you than having lunch with you.”

“I think we can find time for that later.” The grin is audible.

“God, I hope so.”

He hadn’t meant to say that, either. The way Martin’s looking at him when he persuades himself to make eye contact again, he doesn’t mind that he can’t take it back. The rest of their lunch date passes pleasantly. By the time they leave, the rain has begun, just a light drizzling of it.

“Thank you for making time today,” Martin says.

“I’m trying to—” Jon drags a hand through his hair. “Georgie’s informed me I make a terrible boyfriend.”

They’re a block away from Cosy. Martin takes him by the sleeve. “Do you think it’s later yet?”

It’s Jon’s turn to say, “Sorry?” at what seems an abrupt change in topic.

Martin gives him the cheekiest grin he’s ever received from anybody not named Gerard Keay or Georgina Barker (why’s most of the cheek in his life come from people whose names begin with G? he ought to stop befriending them), sets his hands on Jon’s shoulders, and pulls him up for a kiss. Jon makes a sound of surprise, then kisses him back. The rain peppers down harder, and Jon would mind if Martin’s tongue wasn’t doing lovely things in his mouth. By the time they break apart, Jon is practically on his toes, and significantly less concerned about the night’s meeting with Dr. Bouchard.

“D’you mind,” Martin says, still holding onto Jon’s shoulders, “if I want to judge for myself whether you’re a terrible boyfriend, Professor Sims?”

“I think that would be reasonable, Mr. Blackwood.” Jon resists the urge to tug him in for another kiss. They might stand here all day, and that would attract looks, leaving aside that he has plenty to do and so does Martin. “Also, it’s been a few years, I might be better at it now.”

The sky opens completely when he leaves Martin at the door to Cosy. He supposes it would.

* * *

 

If being grappled by the mirror weren’t disconcerting enough on its own, leaving his office to one combination of smells and washing back into place to a different collection altogether—rain and grass and concrete—is excessively so.

Jon’s hand remains in the air over the tape player. He needs to write this down. But it was only a date. It was only the other Jonathan Sims enjoying his life. There was Ms. Hussain as well, in the same position she has in their own world, and he wonders idly if they've got a Section 31. His notebook is in the bag at his feet.

It was only a  _date_. Some things can wait.

He presses PLAY.


	15. Chapter 15

Hi all,

I can’t begin to say how much it breaks my heart to do this, but I’m afraid I’m unable to finish my ongoing fics (including _Through the looking glass, Statement Incomplete,_ and _something rich & strange_).

Something really amazing just happened for my own writing career a lot sooner than I anticipated, and I’m absolutely delighted about it, but it also means I’m not going to have time to work on fanfic unless I want to completely run myself ragged. I would absolutely _love_ to continue writing them (I had so many plans!), but I have to be realistic about my own limits and priorities, and unfortunately, time and energy just aren’t going to allow for it.

I can’t say this enough: I am so, so sorry to have to discontinue these. If there’s interest, I’m happy to type up something of a tl;dr on what was meant to happen in each fic.

If you’d like to chat, say hi, or demand a personal apology, feel free to reach out to me on Twitter @watcherscrown (the account appears empty, but I do exist there).

Thank you all so much for reading, for leaving kudos and comments! The enthusiasm has really kept me going on my rough days!

Again, I’m beyond sorry to do this :(


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